What does AR Rahman's discography tell us about India's shrinking attention span? I studied his music from 1992-2025, covering 2,100+ songs and here are the results:
The average length of a Rahman song has declined by a full minute (or 19%) over three decades. In the 1990s, they averaged 4.98 minutes. By the 2020s, that’s down to 4.03 minutes.
His peak year was 1999, with an average of 5.52 minutes per song. The late 1990s were the golden age of longer compositions. That was the era of Bombay, Dil Se and Taal - sprawling compositions that took their time, built atmosphere, and didn't rush to the hook.
Perhaps the most striking finding comes from the 11-year period analysis (his career so far can be chunked into three 11-year periods). Between 1992-2002, nearly 60% of his songs were 5 minutes or longer. Today (2014-2025)? Just 23%. Songs over 6 minutes? They've plummeted from 24% to under 6%.
The iconic songs that have defined his legacy (ten subjective picks), songs we culturally remember and celebrate, averaged 6.47 minutes, nearly 2 minutes longer than his career average!
We've systematically eliminated the long-form song from mainstream music. The decline is NOT random - it's a real, statistically significant trend that cannot be attributed to chance. Rahman's early work had more experimental variety in length, while recent work clusters tightly around a "stream-friendly" 4-minute mark.
The inflection point (2010) is clear: the smartphone era, the streaming boom, the algorithm takeover. If your song doesn't hook in 15 seconds, the algorithm buries it. If it runs past 4 minutes, listeners skip.
Rahman is just the lens. What we're seeing is how technology reshapes art. Artists don't create in a vacuum. They respond to the market, to technology, to the platforms that distribute their work. For instance, Spotify royalties hinge on stream counts, not total listening time per track.
But it does make you wonder: what music are we NOT hearing because it can't fit the format?