Max Martin knows how to create a number-one hit

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MAX MARTIN is on his way to becoming the most successful songwriter of all time. He deserves partial credit (or blame) for many of the catchiest tunes of the past 25 years, from Britney Spears’s “...Baby One More Time” to The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”. Only two other people—John Lennon and Paul McCartney—have written or co-written more number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100, a chart of America’s most popular songs. What can would-be hitmakers learn from Mr Martin?

For one thing, his music gets to the good stuff quickly. Mr Martin reckons that one of the biggest changes to songwriting in the past few decades has been the shortening of instrumental introductions in order to get more quickly to the catchy vocals. To put his theory to the test, The Economist measured the length of song introductions in every number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and January 2023 (see chart 1). 

Sure enough, the pop maestro has a point. During the 1980s the average chart-topper had 21 seconds of introductory material. During the 2010s this shrank to just 12 seconds. This partly reflects the fact that hits overall are much shorter than in the 1980s. In the 2010s they were on average 225 seconds, compared with 249 seconds 40 years ago, or about 10% shorter. (So far in the 2020s they have averaged just 207 seconds.) But intros over that period have shrunk even more, by 43%. In the 1980s they took up an average of 8.6% of the playing time of number-one songs. In the 2010s they accounted for 5.4%. (The vocals for Miley Cyrus’s recent hit, “Flowers”, begin after just eight seconds.)

Perhaps this musical impatience is a characteristic of Gen Z, which has a reputation for craving instant gratification. But older generations were also accustomed to short intros, and shorter songs overall (see chart 2). The main difference here is technology. As advances were made from the mid-century, songwriters and bands could pack more music on to discs: first vinyl, then CDs. That is when songs—and intros—became longer. But the later development of streaming put listeners in control. Now musicians are paid per play—provided the listener stays tuned for at least 30 seconds. Each stream earns a tiny fraction of a cent. Just 13% of that goes to the songwriter (and even less to the band). To make half-decent money a song needs millions of plays. And so, songwriters need to hook listeners before they press the “skip” button, which means getting through those instrumental preliminaries as quickly as possible. If the composer is Mr Martin, listeners may well hit play more than one more time.■