Max Headroom was right after all - here come the blipverts!

According to the Metro newspaper, "The pop song has become the latest victim of our ever-hectic lifestyles.

People no longer listen to an entire three-minute track and prefer instead to 'snack' on snippets, a study shows.

Nine out of ten 18 to 24-year-olds regularly tune in to just part of a song before skipping tracks. And women have the lowest attention span.

'Bands know that the consumer is listening to just small snippets, so they may have to concentrate on getting more catchy intros,' said Sony Ericsson, which carried out the survey."

Now, I've done a bit off Google research, and I can't find any other reference to this survey, not even on the Sony Ericsson site, and the Metro ('Yesterday's News Tomorrow') is the world's worst newspaper, but presumably this claim is based on some sort of actual evidence.

I was recently saying on the Word magazine forum that I didn't understand why people seemed to find the idea of a long track such a difficult thing to cope with, and then it turns out that we're now finding it too hard to cope with a three minute pop song.

Is this down to too many E numbers in our food?

How long before even the ringtone fails to keep our attention?

Bill Drummond may be right; we may well see the end of recorded music, not for the reasons he thinks, but because no one can possibly concentrate on one song for three minutes...

It's not some sort of nostalgia or because I like prog that this depresses me. It's because great music - really great music - enhances being alive. It makes the colours more vivid and heightens the emotions. The really great stuff can make you weep or dance or laugh or think or yes, goddamn it, even horny. It can become, cliché though it is, the soundtrack to your life. It *means something*. It does for me.

A 20 second blipvert might make you weep, but it won't do anything else.