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Sense & Sound: Five Ways into Taiwanese Pop Musicplay counts,%u201d says Lee, speaking frankly about the changes brought by the streaming era. He notes that music production now often requires the same level of dedication once reserved for an entire album to be poured into a single song, even into just the first 30 seconds.Yet, adapting music to its format isn%u2019t new in the history of pop. Chen points out, %u201cWhat we now consider the typical pop music structure: verse, chorus, then chorus again, is actually a fairly recent development.%u201d Back in the early 20th century, the prevalent 78 RPM SP records could only hold under three minutes of music, so songs often included just a single verse and chorus. %u201cThe storytelling songs we associate with Bob Dylan or The Beatles came later.%u201dLee also recalls, %u201cWhen producing vinyl records in the past, you had only 20 minutes per side, so timing had to be carefully controlled and trade-offs were inevitable.%u201d Song structure and narrative modes have continually evolved with changes in format. Chen adds, %u201cWe tend to assume streaming has shortened songs, but tracks like %u201cBirds of a Feather,%u201d which runs close to four minutes, still rack up hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify. So ultimately, Streaming or not, musicians should begin by truly knowing themselves and figuring out what they want to say.Shou-Chuan Lee