Name: Why this is the average song length
Uploaded: 2025-02-22T08:19:21.000Z
Duration: 3 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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3 minutes and 30 seconds is a very special amount of time.

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Because while the average movie takes 2 hours and 23 minutes to watch, boring, and the average YouTube video takes about 11 minutes and 42 seconds to watch, kinda boring.

To listen to hit song on the Billboard Hot 100.

All of these charts seem to claim that if you gather enough hit songs, they will always average out to this magic number.

So let's figure out if that's actually true.

And find the average length of their 10 biggest songs.

And sure enough, you get a number pretty close to 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

There's some really short songs and some really long songs out there, but on average, the most famous ones will tend to be about this long.

For most of the last two centuries, recorded music was on physical flat discs that we know as records.

You play the record by putting it in a record player, which spins it under a needle, and as it spins, the needle gets closer and closer to the center.

Eventually, it runs out of room and the song ends.

So how much music could a record hold before it ran out of space?

In the beginning, most records spun pretty quickly at 78 revolutions per minute, so it turned out you could fit just about 3 minutes of song on a disc before you ran out of space.

But then how did we ever end up with songs like Stairway to Heaven that were somehow 8 minutes or longer?

For that, you could thank long play vinyl records, otherwise known as LPs.

Which, aside from being bigger and making you look cooler, could spin at a super slow 33 and 1/3 RPM.

In theory, this allowed songs to be up to 20 minutes.

But for some weird reason, songs only got a little bit longer.

Even when music became digital, the average song length still didn't exceed 3:30.

Well, radio stations started popping up, and they needed to make money with ads and commercials.

So unless you're singing the McDonald's jingle in your song, you better end it quickly so they can slap a commercial after it.

And in general, people like shorter songs.

Is there some kind of formula that tells you how long your song should be to get the most sales and the most plays?

Of course not, music is an art, you can't reduce it down to a formula.

But there is a famous optimal readymade uniform lyrical arrangement that you can follow.

To mathematically give your song the highest chance of being catchy and memorable and the lowest chance of being boring.

You can usually think of a bar as four beats.

It's going to have a short intro, a long first verse with a block of lyrics, a short pre-chorus, and finally, the chorus, the main catchy part of the song.

Then a fun new part, so no one gets bored.

And just in case people forgot it, here's that chorus again.

Which multiply that by four is 440 beats.

Now, fun fact, most people prefer songs around 120 to 130 beats per minute.

Which is actually the same tempo you walk at in steps per minute.

So let's make our song right in the middle, say 125 BPM.

That's 440 beats and 125 beats per minute, giving you a song that's exactly, well, almost exactly, 3 and 1/2 minutes long.

Some take out the pre-chorus and they're done in 2 minutes.

Some follow the formula, but they have a slow BPM, which makes them 5 minutes.

But on average, songs will tend to follow this magic number.

And it looks like we're running out of time.

So before the video ends, could you do me a favor and hit that subscribe button?

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Why this is the average song length

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