As streaming booms, songs get to the point faster, study finds

Streaming is making it quicker not only to play music. A new study finds that pop songs themselves are getting faster as listeners' attention spans diminish.

Instrumental openings to songs have shrunk dramatically over the past three decades and, to a lesser extent, the average tempo of hit singles has been speeding up, the research found.

Hubert Leveille Gauvin, a doctoral student in music theory at the Ohio State University, analyzed the year-end top 10 on the US Billboard chart between 1986 and 2015.