Beyoncé and Taylor Swift kicked off 2024 with new albums that became instant classics with their fans — and left everyone else wondering where they’d find time to listen to them.
Bey’s Cowboy Carter clocked in at one hour and 18 minutes, while Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department came in at just over two hours. More recently, however, there’s been a swing back in the other direction: Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet lives up to its title at 36 minutes, while Katy Perry’s 143 is a mere 33 minutes. When Miranda Lambert dropped her 10th studio album, Postcards From Texas, in September, she noted that the album’s 45-minute runtime meant fans should be able to listen “top to bottom” at least once.
So are short albums a trend that’s here to stay, or is it just a coincidence? David Nathan, a former senior vice president of promotion and artist development at Republic Records (home to Lambert, Swift, Ariana Grande and more) thinks it has to do with the information overload of modern entertainment. “Music consumption has changed drastically since streaming started,” he tells Us. “Listeners are favoring more digestible content and consuming it very quickly.”
The advent of streaming initially meant that artists, freed from the time constraints of physical media like CDs and vinyl LPs, could make albums as long as their wildest dreams, but there’s so much media to consume these days that two hours is a lot to ask of listeners. “Artists are always trying to create tighter, more cohesive narratives … especially in an era where every song has to justify its presence on the track list,” Nathan explains. “This approach also leads to more conceptual albums and even EPs, where artists can focus on quality over quantity.”
Nathan doesn’t think longer-form albums will ever vanish completely (see Post Malone’s 87-minute September drop F-1 Trillion: Long Bed), especially among those musicians who have a conceptual story to tell. He cites Swift as an example, noting that her fans are always eager to hear what she has to say, no matter how long or short it is.
“She’s still releasing longer-form [albums] and almost telling a story inside of them,” says Nathan, who is also the cofounder of Happy Jack Entertainment and a mental health advocate. “They have audiences that are very engaged and they want to hear content. They want to see their dedicated fans listening to an entire body of work, and you can’t always be that artist. … Artists decide based on their audience the kind of impact that they want to make and what kind of music they want to put out, whether it’s short-form or long.”
For now, however, brevity seems to be the name of the game. As Nathan puts it, “The attention span is just too short!”
For more on short albums, pick up the new issue of Us Weekly, on stands now.
