Something similar has happened in pop music - because on Spotify (and probably other streaming services, too) a play counts if you listen to at least 30 seconds, there's been a definite shift towards songs that start off with a pared down version of the main hook, or at least start their build much more obviously early on. There's fewer long, drawn out intros (which are normally saved just for videos now).
In fairness, wasn't this also true for radio? I recall quite a number of songs where the full version (from a CD or similar) had an intro that I'd never hear on the radio.
Pink Floyd, for one, released a couple of songs with very quiet intros. If you played the album versions people would think you were broadcasting dead air. Can’t have that. So just jump to the first sound over a certain decibel, and chop out anything longer than a second later in the song.
Which makes that Alannis Morisette song where she’s making a point about people not being able to handle silence pretty weird. The on air version has an “uncomfortable silence” that’s only around a second long...
People have short attention spans. Theaters had to post warnings for the last Star Wars film that it had several intentional seconds of silence, because people thought the movie must be broken[0].
I saw that warning in the projectionist area, so projectionists didn't think the system was malfunctioning, phrased similarly to the one in that article. I wonder if those theatres just put the sign in the wrong place, or thought it was supposed to be public when it wasn't.
Crews-Offerman in 2020, with Offerman spearheading a War on Boredom that is just him insisting everybody should grow the fuck up and be able to sit quietly for at least 10 seconds at a time.
