It's 2011 and Taylor Swift had a broken heart.

For musicians, there's only one solution: music. In an emotional soundcheck for her Speak Now tour, she pours her heart out and begins frantically writing lyrics. The result? 'All Too Well', a 20-minute song.

You can imagine her label's panic. A 20-minute song?! We can't possibly release that! "Think about the streams, Taylor!"

But why do we actually accept that a song should only last 3-4 minutes? Why does 20 minutes immediately feel like 'too long'? The answer lies in a psychological phenomenon that reaches far beyond just music: shifting baseline syndrome.

I first encountered this syndrome in the book 'Nature Amnesia' by Marc Argeloo. Here he describes how each generation accepts a more degraded version of the natural world as normal, simply because they have no reference point for what came before. It's cited as one of the main causes of current environmental problems.

Suddenly I saw the parallel with the music industry.

Through technological developments—first radio, then CDs, and later streaming platforms—our reference point for music has drastically changed. Streaming platforms pay per stream, so the shorter the track, the more money you earn.

What began as a technical limitation has now become a cultural norm.

Previously, music wasn't bound by this time code at all. Folk songs were sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes 30 minutes. This depended on the narrative. A children's rhyme like 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' was exactly long enough to determine who was out. While a ballad about lost love could expand into an evening-filling session with far too many verses.

There's certainly something to be said for the dramatic arc of 3-4 minutes. In that timespan, you can usually get to the core of a musical story without it becoming boring. But if your boyfriend breaks up with you, aren't you allowed to write a 20-minute song about it?

Here's where I see the problem: Just as nature loses its complexity and diversity, so does music. There's no longer room for nuance or experimentation. And this affects my creative process too.

Often I think after 4 minutes: I think this piece is fine as it is. But have I really gotten the most out of the material? Or have I accidentally set aside my epic, trapped in the invisible cage of artificial limitations? It's good, in any case, to look critically at what's normal.

Things worked out well for Taylor, by the way—she broke with her label in 2021 and released the 'ten minute version' of All Too Well. She's also happy with her new boyfriend.