Have you ever heard of "snackable content"?? No? Consumed but with certainty. "Snackable content" is nothing more than all the stuff we’ve been grabbing onto on social media: Content that lasts 15 seconds.
Not only our own to-do lists have to vie for our attention there, but marketing professionals as well. Jagermeister took on the 15-second challenge and produced an album with two German rappers, Summer Cem and KC Rebell. To be more precise: the shortest album ever.
It’s called "Fnfzhn". Each song lasts 15 seconds. has 13 titles. In a nutshell: The entire album has a listening time of just over three minutes. Plus a music video. Ready.
Fun Fact: The record for the shortest published piece of music is 1.36 seconds, called "You Suffer" by the English band Napalm Death in 1987 and made it into the Guinness Book of Records.
Take the trend to the extreme
But why transfer "snackable content" to the music industry?? Do not listen to songs rather to the end and feel them with a self-rehearsed performance? One reason is based on facts. The many information and entertainment offerings lead to a drop in attention levels.
A study by Microsoft found as long as six years ago that people can focus on one thing worse than a goldfish – eight seconds, that is. There one does not want to know, where the concentration level lies on average today. What? Someone talks in Instagram story three slides about the same topic? Away.
The other reason lies with Jagermeister itself. Kathleen Schiedt, Head of Marketing at Jagermeister Germany, justifies the marketing campaign by saying that the "trend" towards concise content has been taken a step further. "How short can a song be in order to still feel like music?", she asks. That’s what they wanted to find out with the two artists.
©Jagermeister
Why Jagermeister chose hip-hop of all genres for the experiment – and not, say, metal music – is due to the brand DNA the company ascribes to itself. Jagermeister itself as a brand wants to be part of this subculture, which has great marketing potential for companies and is a current hype.
With the idea, the liquor brand obviously picked up the two rappers. They also felt like "taking the trend of shorter and shorter songs to the extreme" and "daring to do something that no one has done before", as Huseyin Koksecen aka KC Rebell tells us.
Not as easy as it sounds
Watching the accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary, it’s clear that packing a musical message into 15 seconds is craftsmanship. Go to the recording studio, let your creativity run free, drop a few lines and the new hit is ready – that would be nice.
"The biggest fuckup moment was actually on day one."
Huseyin Koksecen aka KC Rebell
"We thought this was going to be really easy and we’ll definitely record three to five songs that day. But nothing there. We didn’t manage to record a single song and quickly realized that we first had to come up with a good concept so that the whole album would make sense in the end," Koksecen writes.
©Jagermeister
In fact, the two rappers have managed to create an album structure. A structure that mimics a daily routine. If you listen carefully, you can also tell when a song starts and stops. If it starts with full throttle in the morning, it ends with counting the wages in the evening and going to sleep. Fittingly, the sound becomes smooth.
"The most awesome moment for me was when we put Summers and my lyrics together with Ghana and Geenaro’s beats," Koksecen said. This was the first milestone for us during the experiment, because it gave us a first feeling of what the final album will sound like in the end."
No musical trash
What you get from Summer Cem and KC Rebell corresponds exactly to their sound. But it’s also a marketing stunt. Nevertheless: musically, "FNFZHN" is better than the joint album "Maximum III" by Summer Cem and KC Rebell, according to the Youtube comments.
Summer Cem. ©Jagermeister
Fans want the songs in "full length", i.e. in the usual length. Finally, the 15 seconds are the full length, they are not song snippets. So the tracks arrive. The action seems to be a success. And there’s something else fans agree on in the Youtube comments: "Summer without Autotune is so rad".
15 seconds per song – a new trend?
Some of the comments on Youtube under the video call for such a short album again. However, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. At least not if it’s up to KC Rebell. "I will definitely continue to produce my albums the same way I have been doing it and they usually consist of songs longer than 15 seconds. During the experiment, I also sometimes thought to myself – "let’s make it a "normal" song and not just a 15-second track," Koksecen tells us in writing.
"If you already have a good story, you want to have the time to keep telling it and not break it down to a few seconds. I wouldn’t rule out producing another short track if it fits my idea and I’m up for it."