Study shows music streaming services are shortening musical intros

Music streaming services aren’t just disrupting traditional record labels. It seems they’re changing the way songs are made, too. A new study from Hubert Léveillé Gauvin, a doctoral student in music theory at The Ohio State University, finds that songs are getting shorter instrumental introductions to try and accommodate the shortening attention span of listeners. And it seems the streaming services—such as Spotify and Pandora—are to blame.

Gauvin listened to and analyzed songs that made it into the top 10 from 1986 to 2015 and found “a dramatic shift away from long intros” and “a marked increase in tempo.” Songs back in the mid-80s had intros averaging over 20 seconds, now they’re down to five seconds on average so they immediately get to the lyrics. Tempo has also increased by around eight percent.

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Jay Z pulls music catalog from Apple Music and Spotify

Joella Marano/Wikimedia

Seems like an odd move at this time but Jay Z has pulled out all his solo work from Spotify and Apple Music. Tidal, the streaming service that the hip-hop star owns, will be the only place you’ll get to stream all his music. According to Spotify, his catalog was pulled “at the request of the artist.” This isn’t the first time he’s taken away his songs. When Tidal launched, he took out is debut album, Reasonable Doubt, from all streaming services. His Blueprint series has been removed as well. The only other service that has most of his catalog (except for Reasonable Doubt and Blueprint) is Google Play Music.

Source: The Verge

Spotify tries out new look for its menu options

If your Spotify app updated recently, you’ll notice something different when you tap on options of a specific song. The contextual menu you see this time looks different. The icons are gone and are replaced by larger text. The black overlay that takes up the entire screen needs you to scroll to get through all the options. This might be a result of having the text take up more space. But it does require you to scroll a bit more to get to what option you want. There isn’t a change in terms of functionality. It’s purely a visual update. While it easy to read, the icons did make it easier to distinguish what you wanted to do. What do you think? Do you like this change?

Source: Android Police

Drake now holds streaming records on Spotify for new 'playlist'

As Mashable has pointed it out, Drake and Ed Sheeran have built their careers on being underdogs in their genres. And it seems they’re battling each other over who gets to rule Spotify streaming records. Coming out top at the moment is Toronto native Drake. He released a new “playlist” called More Life on the streaming service and broke two of Ed Sheeran’s streaming records on Spotify for his new album Divide, which just came out a few weeks ago.

Drake garnered best first day streams for an album with 61,302,082 streams over Sheeran’s 56,727,861 streams back on March 3^rd. Aside from that, he also gets most streams for an artist in one day with 76,355,041 over Sheeran’s 68,695,172 during the first full day his new album came out.