HYBE’s much anticipated four-member girl group, ILLIT, debuted a four-song EP, SUPER REAL ME on Monday. Most fans immediately began comparing the group to HYBE’s NewJeans, drawing similarities to the R&B and Y2K styles and concepts both groups have taken inspiration from. I noticed this, too, but something that stood out more was the length of the EP. The EP was only nine minutes long, making the average song length two minutes and 25 seconds. None of the songs went over three minutes, with the longest song in the EP only being two minutes and 47 seconds.
The release of shorter songs isn’t just a problem with this particular group. Songs have been getting shorter and shorter, so much so that finding a song that is longer than three minutes has become rare. While shorter songs can be nice, they often lack a lot of aspects that make a good song. Components like bridges, pre-choruses, and climaxes are often missing, as shorter songs don’t have enough time for the song to evolve in a satisfying way. Nowadays, songs will usually just have a repeated verse, serving as the chorus. But this isn’t just a problem in the K-pop industry. As a whole, songs have been getting shorter and shorter.
I’ll blame this trend on the popularization of short-form content through TikTok, Instagram Shorts, YouTube Reels, Snapchat Spotlights, and all the other copycat short-form content that all social media platforms have been trying to take advantage of. Creators often use a song clip, usually the chorus, in these videos; sometimes, these sound clips will go viral. The shorter length of the song makes it much easier for a song to go viral, which only encourages agencies to cut songs because going viral means more streams.
Shorter songs also make it easier for fans to stream songs to boost them to the top of music charts. K-pop fans often gamify streaming songs, encouraging fans to stream a song as many times as possible. The shorter song length obviously makes it much easier to stream, and more streams means more money.
All this is to say that I would really enjoy having a song that lasts over three minutes to last me my whole ride home from school. This shorter song trend is yet another reason why the second generation of K-pop was my favorite era, but that may just be the nostalgia talking.
