![]() ![]() In the course of an interview about the death of the chorusless pop song, the music critic and chart analyst Chris Molanphy considered the growing market orientation of the pop song title: “Branding has gotten harder and faster,” he explains. But it’s tough to forget “ Hello” or “ Happy” when Adele and Pharrell keep repeating the one-word title throughout the song. The last thing the music industry wants is for you to love a song but be unable to remember its name when you go to stream or download the song. Why might shorter song titles be better commercially? Mostly because they are easier to remember, particularly if they are repeated over and over in the song. Perhaps we can add the shrinking of the song title to this list. In his book, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, New Yorker writer John Seabrook details many of these changes: the increasing division of labor in songwriting, the rise of computer-processed voices, the use of synthetic sounds at the expense of live instrumentation, and the emphasis on the first seven seconds of a song to make sure listeners don’t lose attention. With the single replacing the album as the most important commodity in popular music over the last twenty years, the music industry has become exacting about improving the chances of a song’s commercial success. Due to the emergence of the Internet, that percentage has decreased to less than 50%, mostly replaced by digital downloads and streams of singles. In the 1990s, CD album sales made up over 90% of music sales revenues in the United States. ![]() We can’t be sure, but it is probably no accident that the shrinking of the song title coincided with the rising importance of single sales. The number of words per song barely declined from the 1960s to the 1990s, and then dropped by 20% from the 1990s to the 2000s. The average number of words per song title for Billboard Hot 100 hits has also decreased, and only about 25% of this reduction is due to the increase in one-word titles.Īgain, it is around the year 2000 that we see pop makers get really serious about title brevity. The pop industry’s great compression of song names goes beyond an increase in one-word titles. The growth was relatively gradual from the 60s to the 90s, and then accelerated at the turn of the century (more on why this might be later). If you peek at lists of popular songs from the 1920s and 1930s, you’ll find that one-word song titles are exceedingly rare – hits like Jimmy Dorsey’s Tangerine and Billie Holiday’s version of Summertimeare exceptions.īy the 1960s, one-word song titles were more popular, but still unusual, at less than one in ten hits. There have always been songs with one-word titles, but in the first half of the 20th Century, they were uncommon. ![]() The following chart shows the proportion of Billboard 100 Hits with a one-word title in each decade since the 1960s. The increasingly industrialized pop machine likes its song titles short, sweet and on brand. The average number of words per song title has also declined substantially. Today, the probability of a one-word title is two and a half times greater than in the 1960s. We analyzed Billboard Hot 100 song title data and discovered a steady upward trend in the number of one-word titles. The transition has taken place slow enough that you may not have noticed, but when you look back at the history of pop, the change is stark. We are in the era of the shrinking pop song title. Over the last several years, pop music has been inundated by massive hits with one-word song titles: “Happy”, “Fancy”, “Rude”, “Problem”, “Jealous”, “Chandelier, “Hello”, and “Sorry” are just a few examples of this trend. This post is written by Dan Kopf, Priceonomics Staff Writer ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |