kendrick lamar

For several years, the consensus has been clear: Hit singles are getting shorter. Blame for this has fallen on shrinking attention spans, an environment of endless musical abundance in which songs must impress themselves on listeners quickly or risk being discarded, and the rise of short-form video platforms, which cause users to fall in love with 15-second sound snippets, rendering a full track irrelevant. 
In 2024, however, the average length of songs that cracked the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 actually rose by more than 20 seconds, to 3:40, according to Hit Songs Deconstructed. At the same time, the portion of top 10 hits that let over a minute pass before hammering home a chorus rose to its highest level in a decade, nearly 23%. 

While a single year of data doesn’t reverse a trend, it’s clear that longer hits have not been banished permanently from the upper reaches of the Hot 100. Five top 10s last year exceeded five minutes, including two apiece from Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar. These are the musical equivalents of doorstops, more than twice as long as the shortest top 10, Tate McRae‘s “Greedy.” And those hits seem downright laconic next to Drake‘s “Family Matters,” released in the middle of his venomous, no-holds-barred showdown with Lamar, which ran past 7:30. 

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Top songwriters and producers were cautiously optimistic about having more room to roam last year — and more freedom from the old adage, “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.”

“The whole short-form thing has been pushed so hard,” says GENT!, who co-produced Doja Cat‘s “Agora Hills,” a hit that clocks in at 4:25. “The majority of the time, with short-form content, you need a gimmick, and I think music lovers are kind of tired of the gimmicks.”

“[An increase of] 20 seconds is significant,” adds the writer and producer Cirkut (Lady Gaga‘s “Abracadabra,” ROSÉ and Bruno Mars‘ “APT.”). “People may be tiring of the quick little TikTok thing.” 

On a spectrum between succinct and long-winded, Cirkut leans toward the former. “I do like to get to the hook,” he says. But he acknowledges that “sometimes, a longer verse keeps you waiting, and if it’s well-written, then it makes the chorus that much more satisfying.”

TikTok can certainly reward brevity as users fall hard for sonic morsels, even a verse or a hook from an as-yet-unwritten song. But perhaps counterintuitively, when “any catchy part of a song could be what grabs people’s attention,” this may end up loosening the constraints binding commercial songwriters, according to Matt MacFarlane, senior vp of publishing at Artist Partner Group. “Song length becomes less relevant,” adds Olly Sheppard, also a senior vp at APG. “Listeners already like the part they found on TikTok,” so they’re locked in regardless of how peculiar or meandering the rest of the track turns out to be.

This theory also got a vote of support from Evan Blair, who produced and co-wrote Benson Boone’s theatrical, heaving ballad “Beautiful Things,” which peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100. (At three minutes on the dot, “Beautiful Things” was shorter than the average top 10 hit last year, but it did make listeners wait more than a minute before drenching them with a chorus.) “Now that teasing tracks [on TikTok and other social media platforms] is a thing, we often don’t introduce songs to the world chronologically,” Blair says. “If we draw people into the middle of the song, the journey to get there matters much less.”

While TikTok plays a prime role in music discovery, it is not the only factor influencing what songs become popular. Vincent “Tuff” Morgan, vp of A&R at the indie publisher peermusic, points out that many of the star artists and songwriters who released albums last year are now in the second half of their 30s. They have devoted fan bases, so they don’t live or die by viral trends: Instead, they can be confident that even if they take their time, legions of listeners will linger with them. 

“If you look at the chart, a lot of these are seasoned songwriters,” Morgan says. “The commonality is that the songwriters are a little more mature than the Gen-Z, TikTok generation.” Superstars like Swift, Lamar, Bruno Mars and Beyoncé, who combined for two dozen top 10 hits between them in 2024, are all 35 and up. 

Data from last year offers some support for Morgan’s theory. The average length of a top 10 hit was 3:40, and the average age of the lead artists on songs that exceeded 3:40 was around 35. That’s roughly five years more than the average age of the lead artists whose hits clocked in under 3:40. 

Not only that: 12 out of 18 of the top 10s that sprinted to the finish line in less than 3 minutes came from musicians under the age of 30. On the other end of the spectrum, Swift, who is 35, had seven top 10 hits longer than 3:40, and Lamar, age 37, had six.

This is all exciting for Dan Petel, who runs This Is Noise, a management company with a roster of songwriters and producers. For years, he’s been admonishing his clients, “stop sending songs that are just two verses and a chorus!” And now he believes, “happily, we’re evolving away from 15-second clip-based music.” 

“If you’re gonna have a great song,” Petel adds, “why would you want it to end so soon?”