How Short-Form Video Is Changing Music
By: Donna Budica, Rutger Ansley Rosenborg Romero & George Karalexis
Bilaterally across consumer and creator, short-form video has fundamentally transformed the way music and audience engage. At baseline, the prevalence of platforms like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, & Instagram Reels have made bite-sized content a powerful medium for musicians to market their music, even informing what artists create and dictating how they engage with fans. The ability to experiment with shorter formats has induced higher output with more frequency, and emphasizes “hook-heavy” tracks with attention grabbing visuals, specifically tailored for short-form videos.
The influence of short-form, however, permeates even beyond direct creator ← → consumer relationships and into the complex ecosystem of major label music industry marketing. Its impact has actively altered key pillars of industry priority including, for example, resources dedicated to A&R, the definition of A&R itself, and decisions about artist signings. Once the cornerstones of the business of music, these frameworks are transforming, being redefined, and often replaced as the monetary value of artist success evolves in the face of short form consumption. The potential to go viral has quickly dominated the digital landscape.
According to The Forest, each successive technological advancement in music consumption since 1999 has correlated with a 25 percent decrease in track duration, ultimately taking the average length of a song from 4 minutes to just a bit more than 3 minutes—an average duration the Hot 100 hasn’t seen since the 1970s. With younger generations today largely consuming music in 60-second-or-less videos on TikTok rather than streaming on Spotify, it’s likely that average duration, at least in the mainstream, will approach the average of 2 minutes and 30 seconds the industry saw in the ‘60s. But even if song duration is decreasing, there is indication that album length might be increasing, indicating that short-form video has disrupted how much content is being produced, and has radically altered how many consumers engage with that content.
