How sixty years of technological progress reduced the pop song to a single swear word.
I recently wrote and produced a song that lasts four minutes and thirty seconds.
Four minutes. Thirty seconds.
A lifetime, apparently.
My uncle, a lifelong rocker who played guitar with Roy Orbison and counted Maurice Gibb among his personal friends, listened to it and told me it was too long.
Now, when someone who’s played with Roy Orbison tells you something about songwriting, you tend to listen.
Even if you don’t particularly like what they’re telling you.
He was, of course, reminding me of the cardinal rule of the 1960s pop song.
Three minutes or less.
Get in. Make your point. Have a chorus. Perhaps squeeze in a guitar solo if the guitarist promises not to be a complete wanker about it. Get out.
Three minutes was plenty.
And for decades, it more or less was.
Then something happened.
We invented the internet.
And apparently decided three minutes was a fucking eternity.
From Three Minutes to Three Seconds
Sixty years of technological progress.
We’ve gone from vinyl records to cassette tapes, CDs, MP3s, downloads and streaming.
We’ve invented smartphones, artificial intelligence, global fibre networks and satellites capable of delivering almost every piece of music ever recorded to a device in your pocket.
An extraordinary achievement for humanity.
And what have we done with it?
Reduced the human attention span to three fucking seconds.
Three minutes was too long for radio.
Now three seconds is too long for someone’s thumb.
We’ve spent billions developing the technology to distribute art instantly to billions of people, only to discover that nobody can be arsed to pay attention to any of it.
The technology is magnificent.
The audience is looking at a cat.
Thirty Seconds to Get Paid. Three Seconds to Get Noticed.
Spotify has a rather interesting rule.
A track generally needs to be played for at least thirty seconds before it registers as a stream for royalty purposes.
Thirty seconds.
Fair enough. They don’t want people gaming the system by uploading thousands of tiny audio files and collecting royalties every time somebody accidentally presses play.
Except the platforms we’re supposed to use to promote those songs operate on an entirely different timescale.
Three seconds.
Stop the scroll.
Catch their attention.
Deliver the hook.
Make them stay.
Make them act.
Preferably before they’ve remembered they were supposed to be doing something else.
So here’s my job as an independent musician.
I have to convince somebody in three seconds to stop scrolling through an endless procession of dancing dogs, conspiracy theories, celebrity arguments and people explaining how to become millionaires by selling courses about becoming millionaires.
Then I have to persuade them to leave the platform they’re on.
Open another application.
Find my music.
Listen for thirty seconds so that Spotify acknowledges their existence.
And ideally remain there for another four minutes.
All because I had the fucking audacity to write a song.
And somewhere, a marketing consultant is telling me that my opening hook needs work.
The Death of the Guitar Solo
This presents a particular problem for guitarists.
Guitarists are not traditionally known for their modesty.
There was a time when a guitarist could spend three minutes playing a solo that consisted largely of bending the same note while making increasingly elaborate facial expressions.
Nobody questioned it.
It was art.
People bought tickets to watch it.
They held cigarette lighters in the air.
They bought T-shirts.
Today, the guitarist has approximately three seconds to establish his relevance.
He hasn’t even plugged in his pedalboard.
The drummer hasn’t counted to four.
The bass player hasn’t turned up.
And the audience has already fucked off.
Imagine telling David Gilmour that the solo in Comfortably Numb needs to get to the point.
Or telling Brian May that Bohemian Rhapsody would perform better if Freddie Mercury opened with a controversial statement about Noel Gallagher.
“Is this the real life?”
SCROLL.
Too slow, Freddie.
Should’ve opened with “Fuck.”
Father Jack Was Ahead of His Time
Which brings me to Father Jack Hackett.
For anyone unfamiliar with Father Ted, Father Jack was an elderly, perpetually drunk priest whose contribution to most conversations consisted of shouting a small selection of words.
“DRINK!”
“FECK!”
“ARSE!”
“GIRLS!”
At the time, it was comedy.
Thirty years later, it’s practically a social media strategy.
Father Jack understood something that the rest of us have only recently discovered.
Why waste four minutes communicating an idea when you can shout a single word and get everybody’s attention?
No unnecessary verses.
No complicated chord progressions.
No fucking bridge.
Just the message.
Delivered with conviction.
And preferably at considerable volume.
Father Jack wasn’t a drunk. He was a content marketing pioneer.
The Thirty-Second Album
Of course, musicians have already experimented with the absurdities of streaming economics.
There have been attempts to exploit short tracks and the thirty-second threshold, including albums built around unusually brief songs.
The logic is simple.
If somebody listens to a thirty-minute album containing ten three-minute songs, that’s potentially ten counted streams.
If you can persuade them to listen to sixty thirty-second songs instead, that’s potentially sixty.
Same listening time.
Six times the streams.
Music becomes an exercise in dividing time into increasingly profitable little parcels.
But I think even that is missing the point.
Because we’re still thinking about streams.
Fuck the streams.
Streams are yesterday’s metric.
Nobody wants streams anymore.
We want views.
Views are the new currency of absolutely fucking nothing.
I know this because I recently had 16,400 people watch an AI-generated man call Noel Gallagher an arsehole.
Sixteen thousand, four hundred.
A stadium’s worth of people, depending on the stadium.
And virtually none of them went anywhere near my music.
But the view count looked lovely.
So clearly I’ve been approaching this entire music business from the wrong direction.
Introducing My New Album
Ladies and gentlemen, after considerable artistic reflection, I am proud to announce my forthcoming album.
THREE SECONDS TO FUCK OFF
By Lee Painter
Twelve tracks.
Thirty-six seconds.
A bold exploration of the human condition, delivered at a speed compatible with modern civilisation.
Track listing:
- Fuck — 0:03
- Twat — 0:03
- Arse — 0:03
- Hole — 0:03
- Cunt — 0:03
- Wank — 0:03
- Bollocks — 0:03
- Shite — 0:03
- Prick — 0:03
- Bastard — 0:03
- Algorithm — 0:03
- Fuck Off (Extended Mix) — 0:03
Every track has been meticulously engineered for the modern attention span.
No introductions.
No verses.
No choruses.
No tedious attempts at emotional connection.
Just one word, delivered with the conviction of a man who’s spent several months trying to work out why nobody listens to his fucking music.
Track four, Hole, is particularly experimental.
It explores the existential void left by track three, Arse.
Critics may argue that the two tracks should be experienced together.
Unfortunately, most listeners will have scrolled away before discovering the connection.
Track eleven, Algorithm, is the darkest composition on the album.
It’s the only track that isn’t technically a swear word.
Although, given my recent experiences, I think it fucking should be.
The Deluxe Edition
Naturally, there will be a deluxe edition.
It features an exclusive six-second progressive rock epic.
Two chords.
A key change.
And a guitar solo.
The guitarist insisted on having twelve seconds, but the record company told him to stop being a self-indulgent prick.
There will also be a director’s cut of Fuck.
Four seconds long.
For serious music enthusiasts.
The vinyl edition is proving more challenging.
By the time the needle touches the record, the album has finished.
Still, we’re hoping to charge £39.99 for it.
It’s a collector’s item.
A Revolutionary Business Model
Now, some of you may have spotted a flaw in this plan.
Not one of these tracks will qualify for a Spotify stream under the thirty-second rule.
Quite right.
But you’re still thinking like a musician.
This isn’t about music.
It’s about content.
Each track will have its own vertical video.
Twelve songs.
Twelve videos.
Twelve opportunities to go viral.
I can release one every day, then post behind-the-scenes footage explaining the creative process.
“People often ask me where the inspiration for Twat came from.”
I can produce reaction videos.
Duets.
Remixes.
A making-of documentary.
An acoustic version of Cunt.
Perhaps even a collaboration with another artist, assuming we can agree on who gets the first syllable.
And when the album fails to generate any meaningful revenue, I’ll launch a course explaining how I achieved twelve million views with absolutely no fucking sales.
£499.
Early-bird discount available.
The Inevitable Conclusion
The genuinely depressing thing about all this is that music hasn’t become less interesting.
People haven’t suddenly lost the ability to appreciate something beautiful, complicated or emotionally moving.
At least, I hope they haven’t.
What’s changed is the environment in which we’re asking them to discover it.
We’re competing with machines specifically designed to make the next thing more immediately tempting than the current thing.
And the next thing.
And the next.
We’ve created an attention economy in which the easiest thing to consume has an enormous advantage over anything that requires patience.
Then we tell artists to adapt.
Shorten the song.
Shorten the video.
Shorten the introduction.
Get to the chorus.
Get to the hook.
Get to the fucking point.
Eventually, there isn’t anything left to shorten.
Just a word.
A noise.
A grunt.
A man shouting “ARSE!” at a camera.
And sixteen thousand people watching it.
My uncle thought four minutes and thirty seconds was too long.
He might have been right.
But I wonder what he’d make of an industry that now expects a song to prove its worth before the first chord has finished ringing.
Roy Orbison could hold an audience with a voice, a melody and a story.
Maurice Gibb helped create songs that people are still listening to half a century later.
And here I am, seriously contemplating an album where the entire lyrical content of track one is “Fuck.”
Perhaps that’s progress.
Perhaps it’s evolution.
Perhaps it’s the natural consequence of giving everyone on the planet an unlimited supply of entertainment and absolutely no reason to finish any of it.
Or perhaps Father Jack had it right all along.
DRINK! FECK! ARSE! GIRLS!
Actually, that’s four tracks.
Twelve seconds.
A concept EP.
Fuck me.
I think we’ve got a hit.
This is another instalment of Dumb Internet Theory, an occasional series examining what happens when human creativity meets an algorithm that would rather watch someone fall off a chair.