immediately after millenials it was all about streaming and suddenly you have unlimited space for putting songs on an album....Obligatory old millenial experience meme (I'm a baby of the 80s but my dad adopted CDs right away, so I never had a record player in my house growing up):
but also since billboard didn't even count streams yet and people were getting a bit of length burnout (if just because the amount of songs was just so much), rap times got shorter overall.. to a more pleasant 40-60 minutes...
then billboard decided to chart streaming, and pop artists realized they were so big that when their album dropped it was the main focus of the week (thanks views)... and so now a lot of albums have like 20 songs (example.. culture was a pretty solid album, and definitely the best migos project and it was only 13 songs.. nice and comfortable listen... then culture II happened and you had 24 tracks and almost 2 hours that just expects that you are going to skip a bunch of the songs)... actually maybe the problem is the fact that we now have the ability to skip songs that albums got so much longer and bunched together... because they knew that you could just skip any track you didn't like
I think with tiktok this might actually be changing a bit... not because of less songs because that's not going away.. but song lengths are shorter to get more of an immediate and quotable song