Content as Ambience

Why are videos, music and movies getting longer? (After Gioia)

There's a new Ted Gioia piece on his Substack about how cultural products are getting longer.

Gioia takes a look at different forms of cultural artifacts. He looks at YouTube videos, which specifically have gotten longer over time. Specifically, “the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years.”

He also takes a look at movies, which have also significantly increased in size in the last couple of years. He notes examples like Dune, Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer.

I pulled this graph from the Economist which confirms Gioia’s intuition.

Even music seems to be getting longer. Charting the length of Taylor Swift’s albums, he notes that her first record was 40 minutes, her last record is 112 minutes, almost three times the size in terms of time.

I’ve charted a similar trend with the albums of the other Spotify darling Drake, which have ballooned in runtime over the years.

Gioia outlines five hypotheses for why that may be the case.

1. Cultural anhedonia from short-form content. We no longer get a dopamine rush from short-form content.

2. Rebellion against digital platforms. We no longer want to be controlled by the platforms.

3. Long-term generates more loyalty. Creators prefer long-form due to its results in audience retention.

4. Natural backlash against a popular cultural format.

5. Generalized resistance to Silicon Valley.

The hypotheses are interesting and plausible, but they are overshadowed by a much larger trend.

My sense is that the reason why we watch longer content is not because we have longer attention spans, it's because we no longer pay attention to the content.

Specifically, the content we watch now has receded into mere ambiance. By that I mean that the long-form YouTube video is not something that people watch with great attention, the hour-long series is not something that people watch with care, rather they put it in the background as they are occupied with other activities. We are hyperactive multi-taskers and content is like elevator music as we look at our multiple screens and devices.

Content is muzak. Content has faded into the background. Anecdotally, I was talking to a friend who is a day trader and his setup was a show on one screen, two different exchanges on the other, gaming on the other.

The “long-formness” of content is just an expression of how it is no longer the singular point of focus, the one thing that's being watched or listened to. The length affords consistency which in turn affords ambiance. It doesn't define the actual quality of the content or our attention spans, rather that content has receded into ambiance.