shuffle media in the age of a.d.d.

06/04/2005 09:45:00 PM
Gorillaz's new hit single "Feel Good" has been blasting around the airwaves and charts for the last couple of months. As a traditional pop song, its structure doesn't seem to make any sense. It combines hazy lyrics, a catchy melodic chorus, and a rap from De La Soul. It's like three separate tracks woven together; it's musical bricolage.

We are not saying Gorillaz is the first to do this, but thanks to airplay and significant exposure in Apple advertising, its hit the mainstream. In its own way, the song is a perfect representation of our new "shuffle like" relationship with media. Listening to it on the radio it feels like you are surfing three different radio stations. On your iPod, it's like a shuffling experience, without doing any shuffling.

Perhaps this is the first of many shuffling experiences that are coming in music, songs that reflect our rapidly shrinking attention spans. It makes sense, how many times to we listen to a track to the end? Watch a complete music video? There are now even radio stations that have "A.D.D. hour" playing only 1 minute of each track. It's why "mash ups" were interesting.

So this is a new world of three songs strung together as one, a 30 second pop song and minute long TV programs for the PSP.

The era of established media time formats is officially over. It's all going to get alot shorter, don't blink!
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