Radio station now cutting songs in half so listeners don’t get “bored”

In a recent story on the Financial Post, it’s been  reported that a Calgary radio station 90.3 AMP has began using Quickhitz, a format that provides shortened versions of popular songs, editing them down to about half of their original length. You know, so listeners don’t get bored. The station will now be able to play “twice as many songs per hour than other top radios stations.”  Twice the music, half the time.

“A lot of people can’t detect the music has been edited,” Hillary Hommy, vice president of the Vancouver-based company that developed Quickhitz, told the Financial Post. Wait just a minute here, what is she trying to say?  That popular music has become just background noise that we don’t pay attention to?

The station in Calgary will now able to play 24 songs every hour in contrast to the standard 12 songs per hour format.  Quickhitz  also states that commercial breaks have been shortened from 12 minutes to nine minutes for this new format.  Yay!

Steve Jones, vice president of programming for AMP’s parent company, told the Calgary Herald:

“As we look to people’s changing habits and changing attention spans and watch people on their iPod listening to half a song and forwarding on to the next one we sort of came to the conclusion that maybe it was time to rethink why songs are the way they were.”

No word yet on just how many songs are on the chopping block but if 3 and a half minutes of  Nickleback is too much for you may be in luck.