The impact of technology on the average length of songs

Maybe someone wondered: why are songs on the radio about the same length? Indeed, they all end up in about one time, there are no really short or too long songs.

The reason for this phenomenon is not known. Some experts suggest that it has a technological nature: the first phonographs played 10-inch discs, which rotated at a speed of 78 RPM and could hold about 3 minutes of music.

In the 60s, a new format of records was released, which rotated at a speed of 45 RPM, but still contained about 3 minutes of sound. By changing the density of the tracks on the spiral, it was possible to slightly increase the capacity of the carrier.
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If you look at the graph of the increase in the average duration of popular pets, then at least it falls on the years 1958-1959. After that, the duration of the songs grew until 1992. This can be explained by the technological progress in the field of vinyl records and the appearance of CDs.

The schedule was compiled using data mining of all music tracks from the MusicBrainz database.

Around 1990, the average length of a song stabilized in the region of 250 seconds (4 minutes). Now there is definitely no technological limit on the length of the song. So we can assume that people really like songs of about that length. However, this does not remove the question of why, after 1990, the average length of songs is slowly but surely decreasing.