Streaming has changed the way that songs are titled, new research suggests

Song titles have evolved in the post-streaming era, according to a new report.

The research conducted by Michael Taubery, who describes himself as "Engineer interested in words and how they shape society", who examined in a post on Medium how the music industry has changed since the introduction of music streaming, focusing on Spotify. 

The report, which looked at Billboard Hot 100 chart data in America from 2000 - 2008 (pre Spotify) and 2009 - 2017 (post-Spotify) showed that there are more song titles with one or two words in them because of our shorter attention spans.

However, there are also more songs with longer titles (more than seven words), adding: "The middle is what shrinks as a percentage."

Michael found that the number of unique words in song titles had risen since the birth of Spotify, up 19% between the two time periods. 2113 unique words were found in song titles between 2000 - 2008, compared to 2512 between 2009 - 2017. 

His research also claims that Spotify "killed" country music, partly because the uptake in streaming caused big retail chains like Walmart to cut their CD sections in half in 2014. Read Michael's full report on here.

You can now listen to Official Charts on all major streaming services, including the weekly Top 40 singles chart, Official Trending Chart and Flashback playlists.

Image: Rex