In the pop industry, most hits are limited to a typical three to four minutes. This is evidenced by legendary hits and the top three hits of the moment. Why this is so, below.
In the popular music industry, most hits are limited to a typical three to four minutes. This is also evidenced by the three best hits of the moment, which can be found on Billboard's Top 100. "Blank Space" (Taylor Swift), "Shake It Off" (Taylor Swift) and "All About That Bass" (Meghan Trainor) do not exceed four minutes in length. About this interesting phenomenon in a piece "The Entertainer" he also sings Billy Joel. The song talks about how the music industry influences musicians when creating music and mainly limits them in terms of the length of the song, which must be "just right" in order to ensure success. Why three is the magic number of the music world and whether this number will change with the development of the music industry.
In case you thought that the length of the song was limited by the the listener's ability to sustain attention, this is not the only reason for the strictness of the time frame. Three to four minutes is a length that has a lot to do with historical technological limitations. In the early 1900s, the most common way to record music was on 10 inch boards, which means that one side of the disc could not store or play more than three to five minutes of music. So it was an artistic limitation due to the technological capabilities that were available at the time. In those days, radio stations simply did not play songs longer than three minutes and fifteen seconds. The only exception was jazz, where the legends of the genre were sometimes overlooked. In the POP world, however, exceptions were extremely rare, one of them being a hit The Righteous Brothers in 1964 – "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'".
They were also one of the few who didn't care about the restrictions folk musicians the liberal 60s. When he was Bob Dylan already extremely successful, after jumping into electric waters, he also included a 6:34-minute long track on the album "Highway 61 Revisited" "Like A Rolling Stone". His superiors were not impressed with his idea and deleted the "absurdly" long piece from the album. It wasn't until a popular DJ from Manhattan discovered the piece through "secret paths", that the legendary song quickly made its way to many fans, reached the second place on the Billboard chart and firmly entered the history of popular music.
What was once considered a rule, later firmly "stuck", as even today pieces rarely deviate from the three-minute frame. After Dylan's success, some other musical groups also stopped bothering with rigorous rules - Led Zeppelin "Stairway to Heaven" for example, it is as long as 8:02 minutes - but still, most of the songs stayed at the standard three minutes. However, the matter ends at the listener's attention span. According to experts, album buyers are not ready to listen to pieces longer than those they hear on the radio. The main buyers of today's music are mainly young people, who after three minutes want to hear the next piece and so on. It's like we have it embedded in our DNA. Of course, there are still exceptions, today especially in the world of hip-hop (the hit of current star Drake, which he recorded with ILOVEMAKONNEN - "Tuesday" – takes more than five minutes). However, surprisingly even in a world that knows no technological limitations, pop music remains at the magical three minutes.
