Ongoing History Daily: The skip button

I need to you to be honest about something: how long do you give a song before you hit the “skip” button when you’re streaming a new song?  Probably not very long.

Researchers are very interested in this behavior because it gives them a measure of the length of our attention span when it comes to things like music. So how much time will we give a track before we move on? 

In a study from 2014, 24% of people hit “skip” in five seconds or less.  About 30% gave the song ten seconds. Over a third could last to about 30 seconds. And almost half of the people in this particular survey skipped the next song before the song was over.

Well, so what? Findings like these have had some interesting implications. For example, songwriters start structuring their songs in ways that immediately grab and hold listeners’ attention. Shorter intros. More early emphasis on the beat.

Streaming plays into our shortening attention spans and this is altering the very nature of music composition.