# QuickHitz abridged Hit Songs



## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

A local radio station today announced that they would be playing shortened edits of hit songs so that they can play twice as many songs per hour. Station programmers noted that people, in this iTunes/iPhone age, have shorter attention spans, hence no longer listen to entire songs, but skip past the last part of songs, because they get bored and want to hear the next song.

We classical listeners know why people get bored of their music and can't make it all of the way through  but, seriously, what do you think of this practice? Would you like to hear just the main parts of songs so that you can get through more songs in an hour? Or do you want the station to play the whole song?

What do you think this will do to music, how we consume it, its development, etc.?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Classical radio already does this, playing single movements of multi-movement works. Of course, they're not normally 2 minutes long....


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

Brave New World (Huxley) -- that's where we're heading. All people want is pleasure and satisfaction and they want it 'NOW'; why listen to a whole 2-3 minute song when all one needs is the hook?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> Classical radio already does this, playing single movements of multi-movement works. Of course, they're not normally 2 minutes long....


Not in my area, and our classical station has the largest listenership of public CM stations in the US, per Wiki...


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> Classical radio already does this, playing single movements of multi-movement works.


I was thinking of that myself, or also the Classical Hits CDs.

However, this goes further, in that it edits music to fit a shortened format, likely under 2 minutes per song. Perhaps popular music will have to change in order to convey its message in a few seconds to a minute, because people won't bother to listen longer than that 

It makes me think of an album by the Residents, the Commercial Album, which had forty 1-minute songs on the original LP. The songs had a zen-like simplicity (and they have aged very well).


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

That is pretty disgusting. 

I'm almost certain it will in no way affect what royalties the station must pay per song airing, which means to support that there will also be twice as many advertisements per hour as well  Major manipulation of a barely armed audience, is what it sounds like to me, commercialism moving in for the kill, the listener with the short attention span that much more prone to quick hit ads, too. 

It is one kind of capitalist ideal marketplace, with music serving as a mere medium, and the preconditioned generation short on attention and patience playing the part of the crowd of prime cattle to lead about by their noses.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

***Thought the better of posting that. :lol: ***


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

The first question is whether this will work. Maybe listeners will reject it. 

You could actually make the case that this works better for pop, because less is lost. The songs are somewhat repetitive, you've probably heard them many times before. As far as attention spans go, I'm sure there are plenty of TC members who'd become impatient sitting through four minutes of a top 40 hit.

I still wouldn't want them to do this to songs I like.


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