Rushed Pop: New Hits Shrink, Old Songs Come Back in Upgraded Versions

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In the age of TikTok, hits are shorter. Listen to the story of ‘Evoque Prata’, the smallest song to be #1 on Spotify Brazil. US hits down 1 minute, old tracks get ‘speed’ remix. From the left: DJ Escobar, MC Menor HR and MC Menor SG, owners of the hit “Evoque Prata” Publicity/A2M Producer With one minute and forty-seven seconds in duration, the funk “Evoque Prata” entered 2023 as the most played song from Brazil on Spotify. It is the shortest track to ever reach that position in the country. In the age of TikTok, pop is in a hurry. “Evoque Prata” already opens in the chorus, the only element of the song besides the direct verses in the middle. In Brazil and around the world, new hits and even old remixed tracks fly by. Listen to the story of the compact hit on the podcast g1 listened and find out how it follows a global trend of lean music: Of the 10 shortest tracks to reach the top of Spotify in Brazil, six are from 2022. In the US, the average length of songs in charts have dropped one minute in the past 20 years. The fashion for “speed songs”, accelerated remixes of old songs, also grows. ‘Evoque Prata’ cuts the path “When he started to sing the song, I saw that it was going to wake people up. Anyone who heard it would glaze over, thinking: ‘what a crazy song'”, says the DJ who had the idea of ​​opening “Evoque Prata” ” straight into the chorus. Not even the singer and co-author of the song, MC Menor HR, put faith in the compact model: “He said he was small, he kept cursing me”, says the DJ. “We even thought of another chorus, but decided against it. It was the right strategy.” The editor of “Evoque silver” is called Pablo Patrício, 22 years old, known as DJ Escobar. He was born in Ouro Preto (MG) and always wanted to get into the creative and traveled funk scene in Belo Horizonte. Escobar started out as an MC, but he didn’t find, in the quiet and historic Ouro Preto, anyone to create the basis for his songs. He learned to produce, saw that he was more handy as a DJ, and dropped the microphone. Mineiro funk is marked by inventive melodies. But Escobar had such precarious equipment that he couldn’t get that melodic sound out. The way was to make harder funk, or “embrazado”. “The ’embrazado’ can be done with a dirty microphone, dirty box, with anything you have. It was the niche I managed to enter”. He stood out and managed to join the production company Tropa do 7LC, in Belo Horizonte. Even with better computers and programs, Escobar maintained the spirit of creating the way he could, without following previous patterns. So he made “Evoque Prata”, on August 16, 2022. DJ Escobar Divugação / Nicolas Matos The vocals are by Gabriel Henrique da Silva, the Minor HR, and Tales Miguel, the Minor SG. Each minor takes a part: HR with the melodic chorus, at the beginning and end, and SG with the more direct verses in the middle. The structure is different from even the tightest of pop songs. They usually have an introduction, verse, pre-chorus and chorus – that’s in the case of the most basic ones, without equipment like solo, bridge and conclusion. “You can make a more complex thing or a more ‘chicletinho’, which is short and stays in the head. I saw that ‘Evoque Prata’ stays in people’s heads”, explains Menor HR, always straight to the point. That’s how they made the shortest song among the 138 that have already reached number 1 on Spotify since the app arrived in Brazil, in 2014. See how the top 10 of minor hits is full of recent tracks: “Evoque Prata” (2022 ) – MC Minor HR, MC Minor SG and DJ Escobar – 01:47 “Dançarina” – Pedro Sampaio and MC Pedrinho (2022) – 01:50 “Mds” – Kawe and Lele JP (2020) – 02:05 “sentaDONA ( Remix) s2” (2022) – Luisa Sonza, Davi Kneip, DJ Gabriel do Borel and MC Frog – 02:05 “Braba” (2020) – Luísa Sonza – 02:09 “Ai Preto” (2022) – L7NNON, Biel do Furduncinho and Bianca – 02:11 “Bandido” (2022) – Zé Felipe and MC Mari – 02:12 “Doggies” (2022) – Luísa Sonza – 02:14 “Contagious Hit” (2019) – Felipe Original, Kevin or Chris and JS Mão de Ouro – 02:17 “Cherry lipstick” (2021) – Israel & Rodolffo – 02:20 Luísa Sonza has 3 songs among the 10 shortest number 1 hits on Spotify in Brazil Marcos Serra Lima/g1 Mundo veloz A North American magazine “Billboard” wondered, at the end of 2022, why short songs s increasingly arrive at their stops. The report cites a 2018 study by Californian engineer Michael Tauberg, who compiled all the tracks in the “Hot 100”, the magazine’s main ranking, since 2000. The average time of songs on the charts in the year 2000 was 4:10. In 2018, it dropped to 3:30, shows Tauberg’s study. The magazine calculated the average for 2021, and it had already dropped to 3:07. “Billboard” also shows how hits under 3 minutes in length have become more common: In 2016, only 4% of songs in the top 10 were under 3 minutes. In 2022, tracks of this duration already occupied 38% of the ranking. In the compilation of Spotify’s #1 hits in Brazil made by g1, short tracks already appeared more in 2016, and today they dominate: In 2016, 38% of the tracks at the top of the ranking were less than 3 minutes. In 2022, #1 hits of that duration were already the majority: 54%. The “Hot 100” came about in 1958, when songs also tended to shorten by targeting radio. Then they grew again, from the 70s to the early 2000s, a time of high consumption of vinyl and CD albums. Now, they have shrunk again. “Billboard” cites possible reasons: The huge wave of TikTok and its videos that only use a short stretch of songs, without much incentive to make very long and repetitive songs. The system of streaming apps like Spotify, where a short song may be less likely to be “skipped” by the listener. There is also the possibility that a short track will be heard several times by the fan, emerging faster on the platform due to the number of plays. The third reason was also pointed out by DJ Escobar when asked by g1. He argues that, in general, a pop song already has this built-in “replay” (like songs that repeat the chorus to exhaustion): “The music comes on for a minute and 20, then goes back to the beginning and plays the same thing”. “‘Evoque silver’ doesn’t (repeats). It rings and doesn’t come back again”, says Escobar. Repetition is up to the listener. “The person will come back and hear it again and again. It will increase the reach”, he projects. Old hits sped up Sped up: the uptempo remix wave Another sign of 2023’s uptempo pop is the TikTok phenomenon of “sped up” songs. These are remixes with a simple method: spin up existing hits, which get faster and higher pitched, like songs from the movie “Alvin and the Chipmunks”. Just one of the hashtags to indicate these tracks, #spedupsounds, has videos viewed more than 10 billion times. Among the hits are the rushed versions of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, by Tears for Fears, and “Cool for the summer”, by Demi Lovato – who ended up officially releasing the remix. Aesthetics is not new. In the early 2000s, Norwegians Thomas S. Nilsen and Steffen Ojala Soderholm created an album of fast-paced and high-pitched electronic music and released it under the signature Nightcore. In the underworld of electronic music on the Internet, “nightcore” was reproduced and became an alternative niche. This sound has influenced British label PC Music and avant-garde pop artists such as Charli XCX and Caroline Polacheck. The wave that was alternative ended up fitting perfectly into the popular universe of TikTok, where the fast rhythm and the excess of musical information in a short time is ideal for short videos. Brazilian race The fast-paced electronic aesthetic also catches on among TikTok users in Brazil. Among the Brazilian “sped up songs”, there are accelerated and high-pitched versions of “Evoque Prata”, which shortens to just over a minute. One of the versions of “Evoque Prata” at 200km per hour was made by Andrine dos Santos, 18 years old, from Pelotas (RS), owner of the ANS Speed ​​channel. The production is also fast: she says she makes each remix in about 5 minutes, in the CapCut app. Accessibility is part of the fun: anyone can do it, and there are hundreds of channels posting songs daily. Andine’s main channel is YouTube, where she has 1,200 followers. There she posts the versions, which are drained in excerpts to TikTok. British producer Danny L Harle, of the PC Music label, explained to the “New York Times” that “nightcore” gives him a sense of euphoria. William Gruger, of TikTok’s Global Music, told the paper that up-tempo remixes are linked to a sense of fleeting joy: “It’s cute, silly and happy.” In Pelotas, the young amateur DJ Andrine unwittingly echoes the producer and the executive: “This rhythm brings a feeling of happiness and excitement”, she describes.

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