So much music, everywhere. Streaming services now offer millions of pieces and songs around the clock. For a subscription fee of around ten euros, almost all of humanity’s music is now available at any time at the touch of a button. The options are enormous, but so is the competition – and that has consequences for music. On the one hand, pop songs are becoming shorter and shorter, as has already been measured more often. But the texts have also changed significantly: the so-called lyrics are becoming increasingly simple, reports a research team led by computer scientist Eva Zangerle from the University of Innsbruck in the specialist magazine Scientific Reports.
The researchers looked at a total of 353,329 English-language song lyrics that were stored in publicly accessible databases such as genius and LFM-2b can be found and were published between 1970 and 2020. They subjected a total of 12,000 songs from the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock to more precise, complex statistical and linguistic computer analysis. (They left out pieces from jazz and modern classical music because they naturally rarely use text.) Numerous parameters were compared, such as text length, difficulty of grammatical forms, the occurrence of complex words, rhymes, repetitions, and characteristics of emotionality. It was also determined how popular each piece was.
A clear trend emerged: “We found that the lyrics of pop music have become simpler and easier to understand over time,” the authors write in their study. This can be seen in the decreasing lexical and structural complexity of the texts. For example, there are significantly more repetitions. In addition, researchers from previous studies were able to confirm “that the emotionality described in the texts has become more negative and personal over the past five decades.”
Singers of all musical styles have apparently had more anger in their stomachs in recent years
There are certain differences between the genres. There was particularly little variety in the choice of words in rap and rock, although – a counter-trend – rappers used polysyllabic words more frequently. R&B, pop and country are particularly emotionally negative, while rappers have occasionally expressed themselves positively. What the singers in all five musical styles had in common was that they used more words that had to do with anger.
The authors can only speculate about the causes of these developments. This may also be because people listen to background music more often these days, which makes people want to concentrate less. Reference is also made to new studies such as those by a team led by Michael Varnum from Arizona State University in Plos One. Between 1958 and 2016, they found that songs always become simpler when there is a lot of competition on the music market: what is simpler – and perhaps louder – is more likely to be noticed by the recipient.