by way of Quartz, Dan Kopf has a piece called "The economics of streaming is making songs shorter"

I suppose, in a way, this kind of headline would be taken as an argument that people who care about the high art traditions would want to point out that popular and mass culture is dumbing down the collective attention spans of those who enjoy popular music.  Those who draw upon ancient near eastern texts might even be eager to invoke "those who worship them shall become like them" and point out that this could be observed of the attention spans of those who soak up and venerate popular musical styles .... 

https://qz.com/1519823/is-spotify-making-songs-shorter/

Popular music is shrinking. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the 
Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Six percent of hit songs were 2 minutes 30 seconds or shorter in 2018, up from just 1% five years before.
...

But, personally, I don't want rock and roll to go back to the sprawl of Emerson, Lake & Palmer or even later 1970s era Pinkfloyd (and I've loved the band since my teens, so it's not about whether or not I like that kind of music).  I don't think we need yet more of bands like Yes, whose work brims with ideas that sound memorable in themselves but whose songs become a soup of gibberish due to a lack of guiding principles for many of those jammed-in-there riffs.  

But when I read that contemporary pop songs are getting shorter I don't want to jump to a conclusion that this is a sign of attention spans without considering the state of musical art over the last millenium.   Sometimes other variables come into play, like philosophies and aesthetics about text-setting.  Or you could have something like the Thirty Years War messing things up badly for artists.  Take Heinrich Schutz, whose narrative works I'm looking forward to listening to relatively soon.  Many of the individual movements are no more than three minutes, tops.  So much damage was done by that war Schutz did not sugar coat how much it restricted what he could do as a composer.  When so many people are dying of war, disease or famine inside a generation there's not nearly as many people left to perform music.  

Not that I want to say streaming ISN'T making songs shorter.  If people are likely to tune out or change channels then having songs be shorter may be a concession that if you don't reel them in within the first seven to fourteen seconds they're going to switch or, if they zone out because they're passively listening, a shorter song paradigm means the possibility that if their ears don't perk up for Song 1 they may be drawn in by Song 2.  In the eighteenth century the inattentiveness of listeners who were hearing works by Mozart and Haydn was a known thing.  

But as the article highlights, there's a financial incentive to make songs shorter.  

Payments from music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music made up 75% all US music revenues in 2018 (pdf), compared to just 21% in 2013. Streaming services pay music rights holders per play. Spotify doesn’t say the exact amount it pays artists for each stream, but reports suggest it is somewhere between $0.004 and $0.008. Every song gets paid the same. Kanye West’s 2010 five-minute opus “All Of the Lights” gets the same payment as West’s two-minute long 2018 hit “I Love it”.

“[T]here has never been this kind of financial incentive to make shorter songs,” tweeted Mark Richardson, the former editor of the music criticism site Pitchfork. Stuffing more diminutive songs into an album is simply more remunerative than having a bunch of long ones.

Whether or not people stream Mahler's Fifth, I don't know.  I don't tend to stream, so I don't know.  But it does seem that in an era in which streaming seems to impact song length toward shorter lengths, pleas for renewed interest in and attentive capacity for symphonic works that last hours is going against the grain.  I'm just not so sure that's virtuous or that it even "could be" virtuous.  I've begun a book by Bob Snyder this year, Music and Memory, and it might be interesting to learn what maximum thresholds the human brain has for aural content.  George Rochberg used to write warnings that much of the avant garde consigned itself to oblivion by bombarding what he kept calling the sensory nervous system with more information that had less clear audible structuring than it could possibly handle.  Overwhelming human cognitive thresholds for the sake of creating a sublime experience has some history.  Leonard B. Meyer pointed out in Style and Music how Romantic era composers biggie-sized their symphonies to aspire to grandeur.  My sympathies are more with concision and economy of expression.  If the technology we can't avoid has inundated us to the point where our attentional capacities may be influenced trying to force people to "go long" might not be any better in attention and listening than trying to get someone with arthritis in the knees to start a marathon tomorrow.  Conditioning seems like it has to get introduced.  

I'm speculating that it may be 18th century era classical music and even 17th century music that has a closer conceptual fit with the contemporary attention span.  People who listen to jazz and hip hop can still, it seems, venerate J. S. Bach when they've no use for Beethoven or Mahler much of the time. 

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