They reckon everyone's got a short attent

It really is enough to make you weep:

The pace of 21st century life means that young music fans do not have time to listen to their favourite songs in their entirety, according to new research.

Some 44 per cent of British music fans will only listen to a song for 30 seconds before skipping to a new track, while one in five women aged 18-24 hit the 'next' button after less than 20 seconds of a song.

And according to a new survey carried out by Sony Ericsson, the impatience of young listeners is also evident in music sales, with the majority of consumers purchasing single tracks rather than albums.

Obviously nobody at Sony Ericsson bothered to check - or perhaps they opened up Google but couldn't be arsed to follow through - what used to happen in the past, when singles would sell millions and albums hundreds of thousands, suggesting that even in the 1960s the majority of consumers bought singles rather than albums.

And why would you conclude that the difference in sales between singles and albums is because of short-attention spans anyway? Isn't it more likely that people - given the opportunity to choose - people will just buy the songs they like rather than a whole heap of stodgy filler?