At Coachella 2025, the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed with artists like Laufey, LL Cool J, and Zedd, highlighting the growing intersection of orchestral music with pop, hip-hop, and electronic genres. Similar collaborations are happening on stages worldwide, with some of the most prominent artists fueling the trend.

This article was written by Harry Levin in collaboration with How Music Charts. Music Trends on Digital Music News is powered by Chartmetric.

When Coachella is in full swing, surprise guest performances dominate the news cycle. But this year, Laufey, LL Cool J, Zedd, and Becky G joined a set that was surprising to be at Coachella in the first place: Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra.

Coachella is a symbol of pop culture known for hosting superstar headliners. This year three of them are Lady Gaga, Post Malone, and Travis Scott. In between those massive shows, a group of musicians are performing in a musical format that first came to fruition thousands of years ago: the orchestra. They played the works of classical masters such as Beethoven and Wagner…along with orchestral pop renditions from the aforementioned roster of guests.

“My dream was always to mix the worlds of classical and orchestra and pop and fun music festivals like this,” Laufey said during the first weekend of the festival before performing the live debut of her new song, “Silver Lining.”

Well, by every indication, Laufey’s dream is closer and closer to coming true. Pop artists of all genres, including Dua Lipa, Louis Cole, Anderson .Paak, Pete Tong, Billie Eilish, Nas, Willow, deadmau5, and Florence + The Machine have all either performed or recorded with full orchestras in recent years.

Dua Lipa took the stage at Royal Albert Hall in London with the Heritage Orchestra back in December for the television special, An Evening with Dua Lipa. Louis Cole’s most recent album, nothing, was a collaboration between the Dutch Pops orchestra Metropole Orkest and the composer and arranger Jules Buckley. Anderson .Paak performed his lauded 2016 album, Malibu, at the Hollywood Bowl alongside Derrick Hodge’s Color of Noize Orchestra.

“One thing drives the other. Artists are seeing it done more. Then they’re seeing it realized more in a way that feels like the original intent. It’s taking it to a different dimension without it having to be something that feels like a whole other expression that no longer belongs to them. I know firsthand that’s a big thing for them,” Hodge tells Chartmetric. In addition to .Paak, he has arranged orchestral parts for Yasiin Bey, Nas, and Common. “It’s something that I always knew was a possibility. So I was trying to write and speak to it even before the opportunities came, so that when they came I could be really efficient and act on them fast.”

Hodge has worked a lot in hip-hop with and without orchestras (he wrote and recorded the iconic bassline on “Be” by Common). However, he also arranged orchestral parts for all of the LA Phil’s guests for their Coachella set. These days, artists within every genre, from alternative jazz via Louis Cole to dance music via Pete Tong, are experimenting with the format. Now these orchestras are performing in the most popular forums in the world. Clearly, the value of orchestras is both historical and universal, and artists reap the benefits. 

Every Audience Loves An Orchestra

“It broadens their audience reach,” says Karen Garrity, owner of Karen Garrity Music, an orchestra contracting service based in Southern California. She has hired musicians to record and perform with pop artists like deadmau5 for his album, Where’s The Drop, and the ska band Streetlight Manifesto. When Garrity attended one of Streetlight Manifesto’s orchestral performances last year, she saw the broadening with her own eyes:

“I stood in line for probably an hour as we were going in, and it was so cool to see the vast age range. There were kids as young as school age. And then there were people in their eighties,” Garrity says. “I was asking them why they were there, and Streetlight Manifesto was on the periphery of their interest range, but when they brought in the orchestral element, it brought it home to the older ones, and then the older ones wanted to share that with the younger ones.”

More than bringing in new fans, the orchestra expanded the interest of the current fans as well. “They have an intense fan base that is just doggedly loyal to them. They follow the band all over the world. They know every word to every song and sing and chant and cheer. They chase the orchestral musicians out the back door, asking for autographs. You don’t experience that coming out of a symphony hall,” Garrity says.

The visual element is certainly a reason why the orchestra persists today. Seeing 50-100 musicians in action is a spectacle to behold, and fans appreciate it both live and on YouTube. 

In the case of Dua Lipa, the live video of her performing “Training Season” at Royal Albert Hall has reached 26.9 million views, which is more than any of the 65 videos she’s shared in the Radical Optimism album cycle besides the official music videos for the album singles.

The video of Nas performing “One Love” at the Kennedy Center has the 16th highest number of views on the “PBS Great Performances” YouTube channel. While that is not generally a top mark, there are over 500 videos on the channel in total. Plus, the videos with more views than Nas feature artists traditionally revered by an orchestral audience, such as the famous Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli, and the celebrated Broadway actress, Sutton Foster.

Considering Nas’s turn was the first time a rap artist performed with an orchestra at the Kennedy Center (which had been open for over 40 years at that point), this amount of views demonstrates how these two worlds are coming together in a public manner after hip-hop has sampled symphonic music for decades. 

“Rappers and hip-hop producers were hearing that sound often in the samples they use. What Pete Rock sampled all the way to Timbaland. So the curiosity was always there from that side. You couldn’t listen to Tupac’s music and not think, ‘Oh, man, there’s a symphonic element to it. I can imagine that happening.’ It was more, will it be accepted?” Hodge says.

Hodge has been a major player in helping classical music become accepted in the world of rap, and Jules Buckley has been equally important in introducing orchestras into the world of dance music. 

Orchestras At The Rave

Pete Tong, the legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ and dance music pioneer, first curated an orchestra performance of dance classics during the 2015 BBC Proms season with the help of Buckley, and the two have been partners in the project ever since. Now entitled “Ibiza Classics,” Tong and Buckley are touring the newest rendition of the show throughout this year.

In furthering how Ibiza Classics has brought together dance music and classical music, dance titan Tiësto remixed the orchestral version of “You Got The Love” from Ibiza Classics. This brought Buckley Tiësto’s 40 million monthly listeners that he had when the track was released in May 2022. Beyond Tiësto’s individual audience, his remix was added to Spotify’s premier playlist for dance music, mint, which had 5.9 million saves at the time.

Buckley’s audience has seen marked benefits with this kind of exposure. Before the release of the 2021 Ibiza Classics album, his Spotify monthly listeners were at 301.6k. That album brought them up to 521.6k, and the Tiësto remix launched them up to their peak of 1.5 million. Since then, Buckley hasn’t dropped below 586k, spiking up to 1.4 million again upon the release of the Florence + The Machine album, Symphony of Lungs, Buckley’s orchestra arrangement of the band’s debut, Lungs.

Buckley’s widespread experience demonstrates how orchestras are adapting with the times. When Garrity was in college studying cello, her 20th-century music professor told her class that their jobs would be obsolete by the time they graduated. Yet, in 2017, Garrity hired an orchestra to perform a piece composed by an AI program called AIVA, Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist.

“The smart orchestral musicians are the ones who realized that they had to make a shift at some point in their career and expand beyond just the orchestral repertoire. The ones that are working constantly are the ones who can play any genre, whether it’s in a recording session or on a live concert stage or in a rock band,” Garrity says.

The Power of Special Guests

These players populate the prominent orchestras that are backing artists like Dua Lipa and Laufey. Before Laufey joined the LA Phil at Coachella, she recorded the live album, A Night At The Symphony: Live at the Hollywood Bowl, with them back in 2024. Prior to this album, the orchestra’s monthly listeners fluctuated around 450k. The album with Laufey saw them reach 730.2k, and they have yet to drop below 600k. The album version of “Bewitched” also brought the orchestra into Spotify’s Women of Jazz playlist, which currently has 875.5k saves.

To further demonstrate how these collaborations increase the reach of orchestras, Laufey also recorded her 2023 album, A Night At The Symphony, with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Their monthly listeners were in the 33k range before this album, rising as high as 802.3k upon release.

While it is easy to relate this success to Laufey, who currently has 15.5 million monthly listeners, there are other pieces spread throughout the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s discography that have millions of plays on their own. This suggests that there was already interest in the music; Laufey simply expanded it just as she surely did for the LA Phil at Coachella. 

Coachella has said that 125k people attend the festival per day, and in 2018, 41 million people reportedly watched the live streams on YouTube. While there is no way to measure exactly how many people saw the LA Phil perform at Coachella either live or on their computers, it is a fact that they broke into an entirely new audience with the help of the festival, and their Wikipedia views tripled on the day of their set. 

Another artist who has performed at Coachella throughout the years is deadmau5, and Garrity still remembers the audience’s reaction to his orchestral performance of Where’s The Drop:

“I was back in the booth, watching the show, watching the orchestra, and looking around the audience. They were so into it, and they were mostly young people. They were all pretty standard deadmau5 fans, but just watching them react and interact with a symphony orchestra was really cool,” Garrity says.

And then, according to Hodge, the result of more audiences loving it is more artists exploring the format:

“Artists’ managers and friends are bringing to their attention examples of live performances.  As they see the possibility of it live, it’s affecting how they approach the studio process,” Hodge says. “One side is impressing the other.”

Popular songs are getting shorter, with Grammy-winning hits and Spotify chart-toppers shrinking in length. But is streaming really to blame? The answer is more complex, with history, genre, and evolving songwriting trends all playing a role.

This article was written by Sonia Chien in collaboration with How Music Charts. Music Trends on Digital Music News is powered by Chartmetric.

From viral TikTok tracks to bite-sized Grammy-winning singles, it appears that popular music is getting shorter than ever. As drawn from Chartmetric’s own 2024 Year in Music Report, the average Spotify charting song was around 3 minutes long—nearly 15 seconds shorter than in 2023 and 30 seconds shorter than in 2019.

We are also seeing more short-song outliers than in previous decades. A standout example is Lil Yachty’s 83-second hit “Poland” in 2022, which reached Number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and currently has nearly 154 million streams. At the 2024 Grammys, nearly 20% of songs clocked in under three minutes. At the 2025 Grammys, two songs that were nominated for Record of the Year, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Charli xcx’s “360,” were similarly short.

It may be tempting to blame shrinking song lengths on the short attention spans of listeners in the streaming age. But music journalist, NYU music professor, and co-host of the podcast Switched on Pop, Charlie Harding, believes there are more factors at play than one might expect. “This trend is multi-variant, with lots of influences,” he told Chartmetric. “It’s not just technology, it’s not just culture.”

AABA Form and 78s

Historically, song length has been most observably affected by changes in songwriting trends and listening technology. Trends in the early-to-mid 20th century prove that short songs are nothing new. In those years the AABA song structure dominated, with the average song lasting around two minutes and 30 seconds. This was in part due to the limitations of 78 rpm records. In popular use between the 1900s to 1940s, 78s maintained maximum sound quality for only three to five minutes per side.

The 1961 hit “Blue Moon” by doo-wop group The Marcels can be distinguished as a quintessential AABA song. At two minutes and 15 seconds, it consists of the classic 32 bars, with two repeating strophes—the older version of a verse—signified by AA, followed by a contrasting bridge (B), and a final repetition of the strophe (A).

The AABA era demonstrates that the short song trend has long-standing roots. In fact, the shortest song to ever win Record of the Year at the Grammys was Henry Mancini’s “Days of Wine and Roses” in 1963, a song which lasted just two minutes and five seconds.

Verse-Chorus Form

The 50s and 60s saw the rise of the verse-chorus form, a trend that enabled more complexity in narrative. “One of the challenges of the AABA song form is that it’s harder to tell a story. There’s not much room,” described Harding. “So the verse-chorus song form starts to tell stories in creative and revolutionary ways.”

Verse-chorus form traditionally follows an ABAB pattern, in which the verse (A) advances the song’s main storyline, while the chorus (B) provides the song’s hook and emotional core.

Due to technological limitations on vinyl, songs remained on the shorter end until the advent of cassette tapes and CDs. The 12-inch long-playing (LP) record could hold about 22 minutes of music per side. Even so, during this time the growing popularity of the verse-chorus format began to creep song length slowly forward. As that format expanded, songs became even longer. At three minutes and 25 seconds, 1975’s Billboard hit “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain & Tennille is an example of a modified verse-chorus form, also featuring a bridge and refrain integration in the chorus, which further lengthens the song.

Song Lengths Historically and Today

Over the last 100 years or so, popular song length has essentially progressed through three major eras of change, as demonstrated in this chart of Billboard’s top songs of the year by decade, from 1925 to 2024.

The most drastic shift in song length of top Billboard singles in the included years is evident in 1985, when “Careless Whisper” by WHAM!’s George Michael led in the charts at a whopping six minutes and 30 seconds, topping the previous year’s chart leader by over three minutes. Notably, the CD was invented in 1979, and 1982 was the first year that CDs became commercially available, expanding the capacity of the standard listening medium to up to 74 minutes of music. Into the 90’s, CD capacity continued to make extended song length increasingly possible—over the course of the decade, average song duration increased to four minutes and 14 seconds.

Differences in song length can also be largely attributed to differences in song structure based on genre.

Ambient tracks and ballads, for example, lend themselves to longer forms, whereas hip-hop and pop songs are shorter in nature. When it comes to popular genres in recent years, however, it appears that the five top genres of pop, hip-hop, alternative, dance, and Latin music all are getting progressively shorter on average.

Between 2018 and 2024, all songs decreased by at least 17 seconds. The greatest differences were in hip-hop and Latin music, with both genres seeing a decrease in average length by 29 seconds. Also of note, hip-hop emerged as at the top listened to genre in the charts five years in a row, bookended only by pop in 2018 and 2024.

Influence of Hip-Hop and the Digital Age

Hip-hop has been profoundly influential on modern music since its inception in the 1970s, including on trends in song length. As the digital age starting in the 80s transitioned listening technology from CDs to MP3s and eventually to streaming, hip-hop continued to experiment with different styles and forms, taking new liberties in songwriting technique and style.

“We’re going through another formal shift right now, going all the way back to the birth of hip-hop,” describes Harding. “Hip-hop songs have always been of varying length… however long [it takes to] say the thing you need to say.”

As hip-hop became more influential, artists across genres also began to adapt rap flow and song structures into their writing. “You don’t get Ed Sheeran without hip-hop, because the way that he sings has a hip-hop cadence,” Harding points out.

Ed Sheeran’s pop-rap track “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You” is a more obvious example of how hip-hop has shaped his style over the years. Even in mainstream hits like “Shape of You,” however, you can detect a subtle hip-hop influence in his vocal delivery and rhythm.

The accessibility of the streaming era and hip-hop’s popularity were also likely contributors to the rise of hook-based songwriting—or songwriting designed to catch the listener’s ear in the first few seconds.

The increase in hook-based songwriting was also driven by the evolution of production technology, as making high quality music became possible in a home environment.

“Previously you would have to [write and record] the song separately, because studio time was expensive,” says Harding. “But now, writing and recording happen at the same time. People sit down in front of their software and write a loop, then sing multiple melodies over that loop, hunting for the best melodies.”

Harding gives the example of “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” by Billie Eilish as a profoundly hook-driven song. Since its release last year it became the third most streamed song of all time on Spotify, as well as the fastest song ever to surpass 2 billion streams. Length-wise, it is tied for fifth-shortest when compared against the remaining top songs of 2024.