Typical pop song length: Japan vs. "The West"

Cafe Society
1

One thing I’ve noticed since becoming a fan of Japanese pop and rock is that the Japanese songs tend, on average, to have longer running times than Western pop/rock songs. Where Western pop songs typically run 3 to 4 minutes, Japanese songs are more often in the 4 to 5 minute range.

Any particular reason for this? Simple cultural expectation, in that the Japanese music-listening public prefers a longer song in the same way that the European music buyer prefers a 4-song EP rather than the 2-song “single” common in the US?

My other idea is that it’s a language issue - due the nature of the Japanese language, it simply takes longer to say the same thing. I’ve noticed, when reading an English translation of a Japanese song, that the lyrics in written English aren’t really any longer than a typical American pop song. When viewing an English-subtitled Japanese video, the English lines remain on screen for the duration of the sung Japanese line being translated, and it’s usually much longer than it would take to sing the English words.

2

I’ve never noticed Western pop songs averaging out to so low a time. Are you sure about it?

3

Well, if you concede that Britney Spears does “typical” pop songs, I checked her YouTube channel and all but two of her videos have running times of between 3 and 4 minutes. Of the two that are longer, one, “Oops! I Did It Again!”, has a running time of 4:11, but the first 39 seconds consist of a “dramatic” bit before the song starts. Three minutes or so has been pretty standard for some time, mainly because radio programmers like 3-minute songs. ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic presents a nice representative sample of “various artist” pop hits over the course of 20+ years, and the overwhelming majority of his songs fall between 3 and 4 minutes, though that’s a bit misleading since he often performs his parodies at a faster tempo than the original and often shortens or entirely leaves out instrumental solos.

Fooling around with iTunes “smart lists” to sort things, I find that 136 of 1239 songs in my library are Japanese pop, or 11%.

632 of the songs in my library run 4 minutes or longer; 119 of these are J-Pop, representing 18.8% of the songs running longer than 4 minutes.

437 of the songs in my library run between exactly 3 minutes and exactly 4 minutes; 14 of these are J-Pop, representing only 3% of the songs in that range.

170 of the songs in my library run less than 3 minutes; 3 of these are J-Pop, representing a mere 1.8% of songs in that range.

J-Pop represents only 2.8% of songs running 4 minutes or shorter in my library, compared to 18.8% of those running longer than 4 minutes.

(percentages are not exact due to rounding)

Granted, there is a certain degree of selection bias here, since my library is limited to the stuff I personally enjoy, and much of the music in my collection is not represented in my iTunes library since I have a lot of stuff on LPs and cassettes that I’ve never gotten around to purchasing on CD. The overall number of songs over 4 minutes is also somewhat skewed due to the fact that my library includes Rush’s complete output. Even so, Japanese pop represents only 11% of my overall collection, but 18.8% of the songs longer than 4 minutes.

However, I have listened to hundreds of Japanese pop songs on YouTube that are not represented in my iTunes library, and the overwhelming majority of these do exceed 4 minutes.

4

I can’t really speak to Japanese pop music per se, but rather that I think it’s not that Japanese songs are longer than American songs, but simply that American songs are shorter than most of the rest of the music from around the world. Even more interesting is that I’ve found that some songs get played in uneditted version on European radio and video stations that are 5+ minutes, and the American radio edits of the very same songs are almost invariably cut down to around 3.5-4 minutes max.

My theory is just that American pop music labels have just figured out that shorter songs just work out better from a marketting perspective. Very few pop songs have more than a couple verses, they seldom have interludes or solos so they’re cheaper to produce and easier to write and perform and, of course, shorter songs means more songs on an album and more opportunities for singles, videos etc. Besides, it’s a lot easier to maintain an audience’s interest for 3-4 minutes with a relatively simple idea, but it seems to get exponentially harder with the length of the song.

5

True dat. I remember first noticing that kind of thing back in 1979 when I heard the album version of “My Sharona”, with its long, kickass guitar solo that was mostly cut out of the radio/single version.