The Incredible Shrinking Dance Track

a.k.a. Even in dance music, tracks are getting shorter and shorter. Why?

Pop songs are getting shorter. You probably know that already. Back in 2018, an engineer named Michael Tauberg published a study documenting how the average length of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 had decreased from 4:10 in the year 2000 to roughly 3:30. Since then, it’s dropped even further, apparently reaching just 3:07 in 2021. Over the past few years, a flurry of articles have surfaced examining the phenomenon, and most of them identify the rise of streaming as the primary cause. Even so, it’s not a charge that streaming companies have done much to run away from—Spotify itself published an article which basically celebrated the trend.

What about dance music though? The genre has come in all sorts of shapes and sizes during the past four decades, but brevity has never been one of its defining characteristics. Even in places like the UK and Europe, where dance music long ago became intertwined with the pop charts and the commercial mainstream, tracks of the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s often had extended runtimes, routinely clocking in at six, seven or eight minutes each, and sometimes more than that. This frequently left radio programmers and major labels scrambling to make more easily digestible radio edits of the most popular tunes, but even as commercial pressure nudged artists toward more compact tunes, certain producers went the other way entirely, seemingly relishing in their extended runtimes. Back in 2006, fueled by a rumor that Ricardo Villalobos was planning to release a 44-minute-long track, Philip Sherburne actually penned a column for Pitchfork exploring “why techno is stretching out and taking its time.” (As it later turned out, the release Villalobos was planning, Fizheuer Zieheuer, was “only” 37 minutes long, and was split into two pieces on the vinyl release.)

Fizheuer Zieheuer is obviously an extreme example, and while it’s rarely been mimicked, there are still plenty of dance music artists—including Villalobos himself—who continue to embrace long track times. Yet while that path once represented the genre’s bleeding edge, it increasingly feels like an out-of-date practice, or at the very least something that’s out of step with current trends. Like nearly ever other genre of music, dance music has seen its track lengths contract throughout the past decade, and the trend has notably accelerated in just the past few years. Streaming has something to do with it of course, but Spotify alone can’t be held responsible for what’s happening. Dance music is speeding up—both in terms of raw bpms and how it’s consumed—and it’s also catering to a new generation of fans, many of whom bring radically different expectations about not only what DJing and club culture are supposed to entail, but also how long the average track is supposed to be.