Yesterday I was talking with my wife about recent trends in Japanese hit songs.
Apparently, the intros of hit songs have been getting shorter because people now prioritize time efficiency — a concept Japanese people call "time performance," or "taipa".
I thought that might be true, so I looked it up online and found a study investigating this trend.
It analyzed 500 hit songs — the top 10 songs from each of the past 50 years.
While intros averaged 18 seconds in the 1990s, they had dropped to just 9.6 seconds by the 2020s.
The average song length was 293.7 seconds in the 1990s, then declined steadily to 242.2 seconds in the 2020s — a reduction of roughly 20%.
To be sure, “Lemon" by Kenshi Yonezu has no intro at all, but it's really appealing.
Still, I believe longer songs are worth listening to, even if they're less time-efficient.
Take "Love Phantom" by B'z, for example — I'd be sad if it didn't have that iconic intro.
Likewise, if "Graduation" by Yutaka Ozaki were only three minutes long, I'd want more.
So, I personally prefer longer intros and longer songs.
