Songs from Sanremo, from CD to Streaming: Analysis of Lengths and Introductions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2280-9481/22117Keywords:
Popular Music, Sanremo Festival, Song Form, Song Length, Music StreamingAbstract
The transition of popular music from the physical space of the record to the immaterial space of the web represents the decisive turning point around which today’s post-record music industry has been organized. Historically, it has already happened that, in conjunction with these developments, songs have changed at a macroformal level: moving from the Broadway stage to the record, the American song lost the verse and preserved only the chorus-bridge core (AABA), which became a formal reference model for the following decades. In this light, it is legitimate to ask whether changes of the same kind are currently affecting the song form. Bringing this question back to the Italian context, this study investigates the variations in total duration and in the duration of musical introductions alone that emerged from the observation of the songs that competed in the ‘champions’ category of the Sanremo Festival between 1983 and 2025. The results of the study will be analyzed and discussed, on the one hand in relation to trends observed in international popular music production, and on the other in relation to current processes of platformization of music consumption and the Festival’s regulations.
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