Our attention span is rapidly shrinking, here’s how pop songwriting has hacked our minds
It will likely take you around 45 seconds to finish reading this article. If you struggle to make it to the end without your mind wandering or urging your fingers towards a social media app, you’re not alone.
A study in 2018 by the University of California found that people who use social media for more than two hours a day showed a 40% decrease in attention span compared to those who use it for under 30 minutes. Since the advent of TikTok, that statistic is said to have dramatically worsened.
In short, our modern cyber obsession with short-form content has altered our brains. That means it has also altered the delivery of that content. For instance, you’re reading an article about attention span. You already know that. It says so in the headline you clicked on. But this will not be the last time I reiterate it. Because repetition is now abundantly necessary, owing to the fact that your brain no longer trusts that it followed the point the first time around, especially when sentences get a little longer. Because repetition is now abundantly necessary, owing to the fact that your brain no longer trusts that it followed the point the first time around, especially when sentences get a little longer.
In a rather quick transition, we have shifted from a typographic society – one grounded in print and the linear thought it encouraged – to a society so tricky to fathom that we’re simply calling it post-typographic.
“In the 18th and 19th centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content,“ Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Adding, “It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.”
The death of the dominance of print culture hasn’t just altered how I deliver this article about our shrinking attention spans, but all forms of media, including music. But you already guessed that. It nearly says so in the headline you clicked on.
Back in 1945, before visual media truly took over, Johnny Mercer wrote a song called ‘Ac-Cent-Tchuate The Positive’. It was such a big hit that it became a standard that has since been covered by everyone from Paul McCartney to Aretha Franklin. It’s doubtful that it would have achieved that status today.
The song begins with a moody gospel sermon. It’s a dark and brooding parody of the evangelical preacher music of the period, creating a story arc to the song before it erupts into pop. The track is 3:31, and it takes 52 seconds to transition into the hit melody.
In order to get the full story, you have to stick with it for almost a quarter of its runtime, ‘enduring’ a style of music that Mercer fans may not typically enjoy to get to the pun as the preacher erupts into joyous song.
Would people see it through to that point if it were released today? Sure, some people might be the sort of person who spends less than half an hour on social media every day. But others might find their mind wandering or urging their fingers towards a social media app. Pop songwriters have already cottoned on to this and are adjusting the form to fit the new minds of the public.
This subheading serves no purpose other than to break up the type…
In 2023, Alpha Data found that the average length of a top 40 hit was 2:38. That’s the shortest average length in history. There is no clearer indicator than that that our attention spans have shrunken, and we crave content tailored to that.
Another manner in which modern pop songs are the antithesis of ‘Ac-Cent-Tchuate The Positive’ is that they almost always lead with the hook. In a world of endless distractions, you have to grasp people’s attention from the get-go.
For instance, the opening sentence of this article is largely redundant. It doesn’t convey any information that the following paragraph doesn’t already do alongside ratifying statistical proof, but the reason I opened with it is because there’s a slim chance some people will engage with the entirety of this article purely to see whether they could read it all in 45 seconds, an arbitrary figure I based on nothing much at all.
A song like ‘Please Please Please’ by Sabrina Carpenter begins with an instantly recognisable hook. The synth sound that it starts with is suptuous and amazingly produced, but in the past, this would have been considered a textbook introductory hook, and people would’ve said, ‘I love that little opening bit’ and rewound their walkman to listen to it again.
However, in the case of ‘Please Please Please’, we hear the same short motif repeated time and time again throughout the song. Because repetition is now abundantly necessary, especially if it is of something short and sweet that satisfies our brains. Because repetition is now abundantly necessary, especially if it is of something short and sweet that satisfies our brains.
Yet ‘Please Please Please’ is also bold enough to mix things up, to refresh the dopamine loop, so to speak. Almost exactly midway through the 3:06 song, there is a short 17-second middle eight. It proves just long enough to offer a novel surprise, but it never threatens to be so long that you lose the song’s train of thought.
In fact, ‘Please Please Please’ is so perfectly produced for the modern mind that I have attempted to mimic its modes in an article form. This piece began with an instant hook, presented plenty of repetition, and offered up a middle eight detour into mid-century pop at around the halfway mark, and if you’ve made it this far, it may well have taken you 2:38.
Will the article be a top 40 traffic hit, though? Sadly, that depends on whether the picture of Sabrina Carpenter caught enough eyes.
