Today’s music fans are spoiled for choice, what with an entire history’s worth of tunes just a few mouse clicks away, but with increased access comes increased anxieties; Spotify might offer free access to a song library of over 20 million songs but who’s got the time?
Never fear, because the solution to your first world problems have been found thanks to a new streaming format that promises “twice the music, half the time.” How? It’s brutally simple really – just cut the songs in half.
That’s the premise behind a new radio format that’s making its way Down Under after finding success in the US and Canada.
Calgary’s AMP 90.3, has become the latest radio station to adopt the Quickhitz format, an approach that will see the broadcaster’s usual mix of Top 40 and Adult Alternative tunes being edited down into two-minute “snippets”, to ensure “the listener does not get bored.”
As Financial Post reports, Quickhitz allows AMP to play 24 songs an hour – doubling the typical 11-per-hour format of other stations – presumably to the benefit of fans bemoaning that they’re wasting a precious three or four minutes of listening time when they could be hearing more big pop hooks per second. Or as a statement from the Calgary station puts it, they’re “redefining how conventional stations play music as it adapts to our ever so short attention spans.”
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There is a flipside to this ‘chop it in half’ method – it also applies to the adverts, meaning the industry standard of 12-minute long commercial breaks has been shortened to nine minutes, and never more than three minutes at a time.
It certainly sounds to us like the hellish radio equivalent of that one douche at the party who’s constantly changing the playlist (“you idiot, that was the best part!”), but rather than chopping off ‘Get Lucky’ mid-groove, the Quickhitz model uses specially edited versions of songs (some in themselves, already ‘radio edits’) which have been provided by Vancouver-based company SparkNet Communications.
According to Sparknet’s VP of brands and networks, Hillary Hommy, “a lot of people can’t detect the music has been edited.” Quickhitz has already experienced major growth across the US since launching September. Now its set to expand internationally, as stations in the UK and Australia are already planning to introduce the format “within the next six months” (consider yourselves warned).
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The format might anger music purists, but Steve Jones, a man responsible for programming nearly 100 stations – including Calgary’s AMP – in his role at NewCap Radio, says it’s simply a sign of the times. Quickhitz signals an evolutionary shift from radio’s “archaic logic” of old towards a new structure modelled on the short attention spans of a social media-savvy, easily distracted online audience.
Besides, there’s historical precedent for format shaped by demand, as Jones explains to the Calgary Herald.
“When you think about why songs are the length they are it goes back to the ’50s and ’60s,” he says. “If you wanted to be on the radio or you wanted to be in a jukebox, which is how people heard their music back then, you had to be on a 45 RPM record. So that was the way it was done. And here we are 60 years in the future where every medium — TV, print, obviously Internet — everything is being revolutionized and how content is being digested is changing. And radio has yet to question why things are the way they are,” Jones continues.
“As we look to people’s changing habits and changing attention spans and watch people on their iPod listening to half a song and forwarding on to the next one we sort of came to the conclusion that maybe it was time to rethink why songs are the way they were.”
While you ponder on why some songs are the way they are – like all those ‘boring’ songs that are longer than three or four minutes, like oh say, ‘Stairway To Heaven’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (cause everybody knows those bands were one-hit wonders…) you can take a preview of the Quickhitz format with an official stream here. If you dare.
