[2023] Are Guitar Solos Disappearing for Gen Z? Looking into This Phenomenon for This Year’s Kohaku!

A blog post I published last spring drew a great deal of attention.

See also: "Are Guitar Solos Disappearing for Generation Z? Taking A Look at Japanese Hit Songs to Find Out."

I have a selfish belief that music fads change in the blink of an eye, but what is really going on?
Because of this, I measured the length of the intro and guitar solo from Kohaku Uta Gassen again!

The songs from the Apple Music playlist "The 73rd NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen" are included.
*For some groups that are not banned from subscriptions, measurements were taken from YouTube videos and other sources.
*"Excluding interludes" refers to the exclusion of those that cannot be clearly called solos due to ensembles, etc. Even if the performance is like an interlude, it will be counted as long as it can be called a solo instrumental performance.
The following songs were excluded
・Disney Special Medley

This time we also prepared a comparison with the previously measured data.

In this year's Kohaku, surprisingly, I found that the number of songs with longer intros has increased compared to the previous year, and even if we focus on songs released after 2010, we can see that there are significant changes. Looking at the length of the solo parts, it can be seen that the length and shortness of the solo parts are greatly different from last year. Songs with solos of only 0 seconds now account for nearly half of the total, and if we narrow it down to guitar solos, I was surprised to find that it reached 60% of the total. During the measurement, Ialso encountered a number of songs that do not have an interlude (i.e., someone is always singing), which seems to have become the mainstream. This trend is especially true for idol songs where idols are constantly moving from one song to another, and there is no need to prepare an interlude, so someone is always singing.

Are songs with 0-second intros composed with the assumption that the audience will listen to them first? In fact, "Shinjidai" by Uta, which was much talked about last year, and "Kaiju no hanauta" and "Omokage" by up-and-coming artist Vaundy seem to have been composed with a particular focus on the first note. Even when measured by those released in the last five years, zero seconds of intro reached 20% of the whole song.

However, here is some interesting data. I merged songs released in the last five years, including the data measured last year,

The length of the intro was distributed by about 25%.

The result is that the length of the intro is slightly dominated by songs that are 10 seconds or less. The results for the 74 songs I examined are about 1/4 of the total, with a slight preference for intros of 10 seconds or less.

The table below shows the songs with 0-second intros, and surprisingly, there were no overlaps among the artists other than Vaundy. Surprisingly, besides Vaundy, there is no overlap among artists, and although there are many artists such as YOASOBI who have other songs without intros, I feel that the songs are well balanced when focused on the Kohaku Uta Gassen +α.

The overall trend may be that the hard core rock bands are moving away from the major music scene…
I like EDM and electronic music now, but rock music originally got me into music. I like ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION and doa, even though they are very mediocre.
The way of listening to the intro of a song to heighten the anticipation of the song may not be suitable for the current trend. On the other hand, since city pop has become popular again, the trend to include an intro is reviving, and I have high expectations for the future of Japanese music! I hope cool distorted guitar solos will also make a comeback.