In recent years, several studies have found that popular songs have been steadily decreasing in length since the 1990s, a trend spurred on in the past decade by the rise of streaming services and social media.
PinkPantheress made the headlines last year when the British artist, who averaged a song length of 1 minute and 18 seconds on her 2021 album To Hell With It, made the bold claim that a song "doesn't need to be longer than 2 minutes 30 seconds".
"We don't need to repeat a verse," she told ABC News. "We don't need to have a bridge. We don't need it! We don't need a long outro."
However, it seems that the tide is turning, as new research by BBC News reveals that the average length of a song in the UK Top 40 increased in 2025 to a level not seen since 2018. While the study doesn't provide exact figures, charts show that the average song length reached just under 3m 30s in 2025, up from an all-time low of around 3m 15s in 2019.
The analysis points to tracks such as Lola Young's Messy (4m 44s), Sam Fender's People Watching (5m 11s) and Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club (4m 18s) as examples of popular songs bucking the trend of truncation, packing their expanding runtimes with "meaningful lyrics" that communicate a "distinctive worldview".
Another recent example is Yungblud's Hello Heaven, Hello, which stretches to more than nine minutes. "We wanted to swim against the current, in terms of song length, because everything is so digitised and compartmentalised," the artist told the BBC.
What's behind this return to extended songs? Has the public had enough of viral TikTok hits designed to instantly capture listeners' attention and maximise play counts on streaming services? Is this the end of simplified, bite-sized tracks that do away with once-essential structural elements such as bridges, intros and middle-eights?
British pop singer Claudia Valentina told the BBC that fans have become "thirsty to actually feel an artist's presence in their work", while songwriter Ines Dunn believes that "perspective is coming back, taste is coming back. People's uniqueness is making them successful."
"I don't know if we're going to get back up to Bohemian Rhapsody-length songs, but I think attention span is slowly creeping back up," Dunn continues. "And that means that people care, which is very much music to my ears. I'm like, 'Wow, I can make a three-minute song again!'"
If you're the kind of music fan that likes a song to take its sweet time in getting to the finish line, then you might want to check out John Cage's Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), one of the longest pieces of music in history.
Written in 1985, the avant-garde composition is currently being performed in a church in Halberstadt, Germany, using a custom-designed electromechanical organ. The performance began in 2001 and isn't scheduled to finish until 2640, with the piece's total duration stretching to 639 years. Try squeezing that into a TikTok.
