r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 14h ago
Psychology Researchers analysed the lyrics of more than 38,000 songs and found that popular music is steadily losing its emotional depth. Lyrics now talk less about feelings and connecting with other people, while words linked to anxiety and stress are showing up more and more often in the songs we hear today.
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2026/10/song-lyrics-and-feelings155
u/symbolsofblue 13h ago
I don't think the study is excluding anxiety as an emotion like some of the comments are suggesting. From what I understand, the lyrical content has become less emotional despite anxiety related words increasing. Though this kind of analysis can't look at the metaphorical meaning of songs which the study also acknowledges as a flaw. (For example, you can write a love song without mentioning any words associated with love).
From the full study:
Thus, artists’ decrease in negative emotion-related lyrics might be more attributable to declines in sadness than anxiety and anger
Both emotional language (positive and negative) and social references declined within artists’ discographies and across historical periods, with more nuanced shifts such as decreases in sadness and increases in anxiety-related language
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u/composedofidiot 10h ago
this kind of analysis can't look at the metaphorical meaning of songs which the study also acknowledges as a flaw
That's a very understated flaw. Song lyrics are poetry rammed full of metaphor
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u/symbolsofblue 6h ago
For sure. I understand why they can't analyse 38,000 songs manually (even then it would be subjective) but how well can you evaluate the emotionality of songs solely by looking at word choice? What scores would Pumped Up Kicks get? Does it differentiate between "I'm mad" and "I'm mad about you"?
At this point, I'm more interested in the analysis aspect than the trend.
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u/TwistedBrother 2h ago
You’d be surprised. I mean you know how we can talk to chatbots. That’s converting sentences into embeddings in some semantic space. You can do the same with lyrics.
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u/symbolsofblue 1h ago
Yes, but the question is if this LIWC software that they used is doing that. I found the answer here anyway and it used the same example I was thinking of. It said it counted "mad" as an "anger" word.
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u/BigAssBoobMonster 10h ago
I'm more interested in what other kinds of words are rising aside from emotional words. How much about sex? How many about violence? How much about material things, wealth, fame? How much religion?
I'm not suggesting that all/any of these have changed much if at all. I'm wondering if it's more than just emotion that has decreased and that overall meaning in music has decreased
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u/DovahKiller97 12h ago
Id wager that they probably didnt actually read the article and commented off the headline alone. I also came to the same conclusion as you after reading both the comments and the article
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u/Disastrous-Road184 8h ago
I came to the same conclusion as you from reading the headline so that’s not it.
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u/DovahKiller97 8h ago
Occam's razor, I just assume most people scrolling their reddit feed are too lazy to actually read an article before commenting the first thing that popped in their head
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u/Disastrous-Road184 8h ago
“ From what I understand, the lyrical content has become less emotional despite anxiety related words increasing.”
That’s what it outright says in what OP showed.
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u/SirHerald 8h ago
Year 1: 10 emotional words. 1 about anxiety.
Year 2: 5 emotional words. 2 about anxiety
Emotional words cut by half. Anxiety words doubled
Anxiety words now 40% of content instead of 10%
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u/Disastrous-Road184 8h ago edited 5h ago
Yes, this is why.
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u/MaggotMinded 7h ago edited 2h ago
I don’t think they’re disagreeing, just further illustrating the point.
Edit: Looks like they’ve edited their comment so now mine doesn’t make sense anymore.
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u/symbolsofblue 6h ago
Yeah I was doubting my interpretation because so many of the top comments seemed to have come to a different conclusion.
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u/ChelleInSand 13h ago
Lyrics Dealing with Anxiety and stress doesn’t mean there is a lack of emotional depth though. It just means less happiness and connection. That is to be expected during difficult times. That doesn’t mean there is less emotional depth.
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u/Moosycakes 13h ago
Agreed, and reading the article it seems more like the study had multiple findings: that music overall is losing its emotional depth, and that lyrics overall have shifted towards anxiety/stress rather than other emotions like sadness. The title makes it seem like the two findings are more closely related than they actually are- it can be true that music is less emotional overall while the emotional tone/focus of music that does centre emotions has also changed.
I think the main part where the title gets it wrong is where it says “words linked to anxiety and stress are showing up more and more often in the songs we hear today”- this statement somewhat implies that lyrics are getting MORE emotional, because it doesn’t include the important context of this being in comparison to the other measured emotions found in music, rather than just an increase in general.
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u/HoidToTheMoon 4h ago
It does sound like an increase in general, but just for anxious songs.
Let's simplify it and say we gathered 10 songs. 4 of them are not emotional, 3 are sad songs and 3 are anxious songs.
Now, lets say we gathered another 10 songs a decade later. This time 5 of them are not emotional, 4 are anxious and only 1 is about feeling sad.
That creates a situation where we see a drop in emotionally conscious music, a sharp drop in sad songs, and an increase in songs related to anxiety.
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u/moal09 13h ago
Very strange that the article is equating stress/anxiety with less emotional depth.
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u/chikanishing 10h ago
I didn’t get that from the article. They concluded it based on fewer positive and negative words, and less reference to family and friends.
The stress/anxiety shift was just another change they noticed.
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u/dcheesi 13h ago edited 13h ago
Maybe some sense that anxiety and such are "base instincts", while love and sorrow are noble and dramatic emotions? Which is of course pretentious and unscientific nonsense.
There's also the question of frankness. It's been observed that younger generations have become much more open in talking about mental illness, and that's reflected in popular music as well.
Back in my day, groups like Nine Inch Nails talked about negative emotions, but it was largely couched in poetic language [especially when it came to emotions like fear and feeling overwhelmed]. Whereas Linkin Park was one of the first to just flat out say "I'm anxious all the time, and it sucks". That directness could be mistaken for lack of depth and/or artistry
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u/TheSmartAssLion 2h ago
Little late to the party, but I firmly believe there is a lot of equating going on between emotional depth and prosiac complexity going on here.
There is definitely a reduction in complexity of speech (in political speeches the drop off happened in the 70s), and i think that could definitely lead the older generations to conflate the lack of complexity in vocabulary and grammar to a lack of complexity in emotions.
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u/prancerbot 8h ago
I would think that stress and anxiety are the opposite of personal more self centered emotions. Almost like suppressors of real emotion that have a minimizing effect on your personality.
Not sure how this relates to their emotional development but from my view it seems like the oppressive world is stunting their growth.
Of course human personal development is ridiculously complicated and maybe it will be for the best that younger people aren't as emotionally indulgent as previous generations. It could be an important reaction to a change in environment that we have had.
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u/Icy-Cup 13h ago
Maaaybeee - I’m wondering (genuinely curious) if:
- in previous “difficult times” we did see similar change and i
f yes - was it t
- o the same degree (Great Depression, ‘08 crisis etc)
- if it isn’t our usual suspect - the internet and move of general public online - which corresponds to less friends less dating etc (known from other studies). If yes - cool that you have emotions about yourself - but aren’t we loosing emotions about others (empathy, love, even lust).
In short - is it really “tough times, sad songs” or maybe “everyone got affected by switch from real social circles to social media ones and it shows everywhere”? And how can we check which one is it?
Edit: ok points are broken and won’t fix on mobile, sorry
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u/Sea_Willingness_1536 11h ago
More than ever, youth (the primary consumers of music) are being directly exposed to the accelerating collapse of almost every system that gave their grandparents wealth and their parents stability. From climate change to the rise of right-wing politics to the collapse of education under LLMs to nonsense from social media to impossible housing costs, every stable foundation is evaporating.
I'd be anxious, too.
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u/AssinineAssassin 11h ago
Maybe by depth they mean the words used are more about describing than prescribing.
Like Doechii lyrics are “my anxiety, can’t shake it off of me, somebody’s watching me and my anxiety”
While Eminem lyrics are “knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already”
The depth has fallen away into a label in this anecdotal example
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u/WilyWascallyWizard 6h ago
No it just means there is less overall and more of what is still there has shifted towards anxiety.
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u/chikanishing 10h ago
That’s not what I picked up from the article though. The stress/anxiety shift seemed to just be another change they noticed. The abstract of the actual article says emotion related words decreased in general, and calls the decrease of sadness related words and increase of anxiety related word a nuanced pattern within the general pattern.
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u/exactlylong 12h ago
It seems like the study conflates prosocial connection with emotional complexity. Anxiety, alienation, and chronic stress are intense emotional states, not a void of feeling.
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u/Bugbread 10h ago
It only seems like that to you because you didn't actually read the study, just the MSU article about the study. Or, worse yet, the title of the post about the article about the study.
If you actually read the study, you'd know that it's not doing that, and this post title is simply mischaracterizing it.
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u/blegh-01 1h ago
The study was actually focused on the quantity of emotive lyrics (both positive and negative) as an artists career goes on, and how it tends to decline. Hence a loss of emotional depth. The finding discussed by the post and the article therein was a secondary finding and did not equate negatively emotional lyrics with a lack of depth. Basically the post is mis-titled.
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u/EveningGalaxy 8h ago
It doesn't even necessarily mean that. It could just mean that people and society are more accepting about talking about emotions like anxiety.
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u/Kahzgul 13h ago
Ahem. Anxiety is an emotional state, too.
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u/User-K549125 11h ago
Sounds like the emotions have shifted, not the depth, and the old ruler is outdated.
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u/hacksoncode 5h ago
Yes, but the study basically said that: it showed both a decrease overall in emotional expressions and a shift of those expressions towards things like anxiety.
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u/Scary-Species1613 14h ago
I wonder how much of this reflects changes in the way people write about emotions, rather than people actually feeling less connected. Music trends change, but the rise in anxiety-related language is interesting. It would be worth seeing whether the same pattern holds across different genres.
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u/symbolsofblue 12h ago
From the full study:
All told, given how rarely genre moderated the estimates from the main model (93.2% were nonsignificant and even fewer effects would likely survive a modest alpha level correction ), we concluded that genre largely did not moderate within-artist or historic changes in song lyrics
I think the emotional content differs between genres, but the change has been consistent across genres? In other words, one genre might have more positive emotion words than another, but they all saw a decrease.
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u/Looonity 7h ago edited 6h ago
This goes deeper than just music. The philosophy of why this has happened has been well thought out. Its why movies aren't as genuine, and everything in general feels kind of empty.
its called many things, the self under siege, the death of God, the hyper-reality. ( these sound crazy, but are real philisophical terms )
It boils down to the fact that we keep trying to replicate genuine things, but lack the capacity to understand why they are that way, and like a file thats copied too many times, its lost the essential data that makes it up. You end up with an empty simulacrum.
This wouldn't be an issue, but the speed and overwhelming nature of the modern age has severed us from our tried and true paths to reliably find meaning and depth in life. ( and the old paths to meaning like religion are starting to make less sense to us, so they arent reliable either )
Philosophers like Rick Roderick (has a great YouTube series from the 90s on the topic)
Jean Boulliard, Nietzche, and Carl Jung also comment on this, though Rick synthesizes it well for the modern mind to understand.
In essence we are losing OG data.
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u/MushinZero 5h ago
I don't think we are losing original data. It's not like finding meaning in life is something that needs past knowledge.
We are just too busy struggling to survive in this day and age to be able to contemplate or appreciate life.
There's very little breathing room in today's society. A lucky few get a few vacation days a year and those are usually spent rushing around. When we do get free time we are consuming media.
People need time to think. Contemplate. Muse. Write. Appreciate.
There's just not enough time and too many distractions.
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u/Looonity 5h ago edited 4h ago
That's a huge part of the idea as well, social pressures and work have become machine like and inhuman.
The philosophy points out that the past had good sources of meaning ( religion, as much damage as it caused, fulfilled this role well )
The goal is to modernize how we get meaning and purpose. Which would involve giving people more free time and personal dignity, and meaningful work. The "new" source of meaning can come from life itself when its lived well, and treated with respect. Sadly though these days its reduced to how well off are you financially, which has little real meaning attached to it.
We tend to reach back in the past for those old sources of meaning, but they just dont work anymore. That's why we lose data. The human instinct is to reach into the past, but we keep reaching for the wrong things.
Its not like we couldn't make new data, but we tend not too. Marvel is great example. They've milked something old so long that its dry and empty. All the time the potential to make something new was there, but they just rehash the old, and even that is just a more modern retelling of ancient myth, which came from mimicry of nature.
Edit: I know this is very negative and pessimistic, but I actually have a good deal of hope that this is just a temporary hill for humanity to climb. Humans are amazing, and are capable of doing the impossible. As Chaplin said "tis but the passing of greed"
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u/Retroviridae6 DO | Physician 5h ago
You think we in 2026 are struggling more to survive than people in 1826, 1726, 1626, etc.?
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u/ww_crimson 4h ago
I don't think we are struggling more, but society moves at a much faster pace. We're constantly optimizing for efficiency, and have very little mental down time comparatively.
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u/Looonity 4h ago
This gets confused a whole lot. Its not about how easy it is to survive ( it was certainly a lot harder to survive even 100 years ago )
Its about how much meaning is derived from life. You can have a life of pure suffering, but imagine if all that suffering was for a great cause like the freedom of fellow men. A life like that has great meaning, and we cant say it was a bad life. Just an unpleasant experience.
On the other hand imagine a modern man rich in wealth. His every need met, and yet does nothing with his life. Believes in no great purpose. Doesn't even bother to ask the question "why am I here"?
Which life is better? I'd take the first one in a heartbeat.
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u/A-town 4h ago
We have more to distract ourselves than people in those time periods did.
I had heard an argument that Art died during the HIV/AIDS crisis because there weren't enough mentors and models for newer artists to emulate. I could consider this along with the ushering in of the personal computer the end of Art: you can spend hundreds of hours painting something that literally looks exactly like a pencil and the people viewing your labor will click a button to like it and move on. We are constantly seeking novelty and searching around the fringes for people emulating the art of music that we have enjoyed in the past and not taking the time to really appreciate it, imo.
As an argument, think about the number of Americans who have read one book to completion in any given year. When you have a lot of free time without distractions, that percentage probably goes up. We are ingrained to sell out novelty, and the little pocket computers allow us to do that at any given moment of any given day. No wonder people don't want to sit down and read hundreds of pages of one story, or even watch a movie in their own home: they have the ultimate source in entertainment on their hand. Anybody who tries too hard to be genuine is just not going to be as satisfied as somebody who throws out some catchy slop.
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u/jenksanro 5h ago
I don't see why they would be, we probably have more free time than in most historical periods, and every generation seems to think that their own is the one facing the unprecedented crisis but the world survives every time.
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u/Accomplished-Fix3401 5h ago
This. Everything has to be a safe bet. Vulnerability is not safe, but marketing lets you craft a personal brand (which is impersonal)
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u/helaku_n 2h ago
too many distractions.
Your comment could be summarized by this. People are consuming media and social media instead of real (not online, online is too shallow) communication.
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u/Fit-Switch-5795 5h ago
I got an idea for a sci fi story the other day:
If you look at a photo of the '40s,'50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, or '90s, it is quite easy to tell which decade the photo is of. Similarly with music.
Now, it is extremely difficult to notice any difference in fashion since 2000. Why? Why did fashion and music just start being remixes of 20th century styles and genres?
There has been a progression in technology though. Why?
My idea is that when aliens crashed in the 1950s and we got access to their tech, very quickly our technology changed. Computers aren't earth culture - they're alien.
And since then, aliens, from many different planets, have been incarnating into human bodies, and we don't quite understand human culture, so like a wizard wearing mismatched Muggle clothes, we just remix what we've found -AI is the ultimate version of this.
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u/Looonity 4h ago
The fact you thought of this is a testament to the idea. It feels so inhuman that the human mind can fantasize that its alien. The alienation of man.
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u/fddfgs 14h ago
Nobody sings songs about specific people anymore, why sing about Eleanor Rigby when you can sing about a generic person and make more sales?
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u/Sea_Willingness_1536 11h ago
They hip hop and rap about specific people now. If you want concrete lyrics, that's where to go.
Kendrick's recent hit was all about Drake.
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak 13h ago
I mean the newer music in indie and folk talk a lot about depression and loneliness as well.
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine 14h ago
Study of 38K+ songs finds lyrics are losing feeling
New research from Michigan State University finds that popular music has gradually become less explicit about emotion and relationships — both across generations of artists and within artists’ careers.
The study, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, is the largest of its kind to analyze song lyrics. The final dataset includes 38,467 songs from 230 artists spanning close to a century of popular music from 1947 to 2024. Discographies were manually checked by a team of roughly 30 research assistants after the initial lyric collection.
“A lot of previous work has asked whether music changes across decades, but much less has examined whether the same artists change across the course of their careers,” said Jan Brascamp, co-author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “By looking at both at once, we can begin separating changes that happen within artists from broader shifts in culture and the music industry.”
The study found that lyrics became less emotional and less socially focused over time. Within artists’ careers, both positive and negative words declined, as did references to family and friends. Specific shifts show that anxiety-related language increased while sadness declined in lyrics.
The researchers found similar historical patterns when comparing artists from different eras. These broader historical differences were generally larger than the changes that occurred within individual artists’ careers.
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u/amyfearne 13h ago
Are stress and anxiety not emotions?
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u/chikanishing 10h ago
Within the general decrease if emotion related lyrics, stress and anxiety lyrics increased, but there was still an overall decrease.
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u/hacksoncode 5h ago
Why would the study, which is about emotional content, talk about anxiety increasing (and sadness decreasing) if it wasn't considering those to be emotions?
I.e. Yes, which is the point.
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u/Sea_Willingness_1536 11h ago
That's a tiny sample size, fewer than 1k/year, and the number of artists is worrying, only 4/year. No one in their right mind would say 4 artists writing 549 songs a year (that's 2/day!) is a sane measure of song sentiment. I doubt there are any songwriters in history who could manage that level of output and somehow also have their finger on the pulse of society.
When I looked at the Spotify data set, which covered from early 1900s to 2022-ish, computation forced me to limit my study to 10k/year when looking at songs in a single year, and in that, roughly 7-9k artists.
I hate to say this, but the study looks very silly.
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u/helendestroy 13h ago
“People often become more emotionally regulated and invest more in meaningful relationships as they age, so we might expect that lyrics become more positive or relational across an artists’ career,” said Logan Gibson, lead-author and MSU research associate. “Instead, positive emotions and social references declined. That suggests song lyrics may be strongly shaped by artistic, cultural or industry-level forces.” The researchers hope this study shows how large collections of everyday cultural products from songs, books, social media and films can be used to study how people express emotion and how relationships change over time. “Music is not just entertainment. People use songs to regulate their emotions, understand themselves, develop their identities and feel connected to other people. That makes lyrics an interesting record of what artists — and potentially the audiences and cultures around them — are choosing to talk about,” said William Chopik, co-author and former associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “So, when we see large-scale declines in emotional and social language, it raises interesting questions about whether the way we express feelings and relationships has changed more broadly.”
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u/Putrid-Ice-7511 10h ago
I can agree that a lot of popular music lacks emotional depth, and perhaps there’s more of it today. But how exactly does an increase in lyrics about anxiety and stress indicate a lack of emotional depth? If anything, exploring difficult emotions could suggest the opposite.
Emotional depth isn’t determined by which emotions are expressed, or how frequently certain words appear. It’s about how those emotions are expressed, the relationships between them, and the meaning they communicate. A song about love can be incredibly shallow, while a song about anxiety, loneliness, or grief can be incredibly profound.
And we’re talking about music here. The lyrics are only one part of the expression. Melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, and performance all contribute to its emotional significance.
I’m sure there are interesting patterns to discover by analysing 38,000 songs, but I don’t see how changes in emotional vocabulary establish a decline in emotional depth. That seems like an enormous leap from what is actually being measured to what is supposedly being concluded.
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u/chikanishing 10h ago
The study does not say anxiety related words mean a lack of emotional depth.
It says there is a decrease of emotion related words in general, and within that decrease there happens to be an increase in anxiety related words.
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u/olivebranchsound 8h ago
Yeah the total amount of emotional words goes down, but words linked to anxiety increases among that smaller group of emotional words.
Old: 10 emotional words, with 1 anxiety New: 5 emotional words, with 2 anxiety.
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u/IKillZombies4Cash 11h ago
I’d argue a lack of emotion is an emotion. It’s not something that happens randomly, it’s a feedback loop just like fear or worry. Maybe it’s better called a coping mechanism but it’s not without root cause.
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u/housewithapool2 13h ago
So the monster mash, lollipop, the twist, do wap, and mister sandman were deep and we've devolved. Or this is nonsense.
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u/Eddyphish 12h ago
I'd actually like less lyrics about emotional connection between people, thanks. Almost every pop song in existence, especially Taylor Swift, seems to be about how they feel about either A.) an ex they don't like, or B.) a current partner they do like.
Let's have some more complex ideas please!
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u/Starhopper45 8h ago
Emotional connection isn’t just about relationships. Give the album Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd) a shot if you haven’t already.
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u/EpicEpicnessTheEpic 10h ago
I just want the simple days of "I'm blue, da-ba-dee-da-ba-di".
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u/Vulpes_Corsac 9h ago
Too much of heaven, that's what we had with the lyrics back then.
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u/frogguts198 8h ago
It really brought us underground
Edit; also, we got P L A Y S T A TION
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u/NotBearhound 7h ago
Actually playing Omega Boos while blasting that song is a golden child memory for me. Eiffel 65 was LIT I tell you!
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u/Kindly_Honeydew3432 5h ago
That song was actually about the intense emotional relationship between a father and son, with the son feeling rejected for not being able to live up to the fathers unrealistic expectations as “real man”, while the father feels like a failure because he can’t adequately express his love for his son via providing the kind of life he thinks he deserves, even though that’s the thing that the son cares about the least and he just wants to connect in a real way with his father before it’s too late and he’s gone.
That’s why they’re so blue.
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u/geodebug 8h ago
TS is a pretty bad example of “emotional connection”. Yeah, her oeuvre is about her love life but the songs tend to be pretty shallow and juvenile.
Real emotional connection songs can make you feel deeply and describe the human condition without resorting to cliches. Artists like Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell or modern ones like
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u/sunsetandporches 7h ago
Yeah we can't just shake off over dose and death or like children and divorce. I think juvenile is the perfect term for her songs.
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u/Shawn_NYC 13h ago edited 13h ago
The only way to arrive at this opinion is to have amnesia of the lyrics from every other band that's existed over the last 75 years.
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u/flojo2012 11h ago
If I want to hear songs about emotion, I can usually find it in metal more than pop
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u/Animus_Antonius 11h ago
My analysis of their analysis of songs from 1947 to 2024:
It was easier for boomers.
Rent: At the federal minimum wage, covering one month's median rent required ≈ 105 hours of work in 1950 vs. 205 hours in 2024—nearly twice as much
Imagine what kind of effect having 50% less autonomy would have on what you choose to express artistically -- specifically in a culture where everyone who had 50% MORE autonomy is blaming YOU for achieving 50% LESS in your life.
Roughly speaking of course, but you get the idea.
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u/Kremidas 10h ago
The first generation to be raised on the internet were inadvertently trained by the dopamine hits of likes and comments and other forms of attention to shape their behavior during important social developmental periods in ways that do not involve real in the moment feedback of tone and facial expression you get from just interacting with people in real life. It has stunted emotional growth at the same time as music industry has reached its zenith of formulaic lowest common denominator soulless and dumb art by focus group and debate disposable color by numbers sonic equivalent of a big mac that we call pop music. Oh and while they’re on the internet they are surrounded by adults picking each other’s words apart and mocking harmless people and calling things cringe and having competitions to see who cares the least about anything and getting highly rewarded for it. That is how they were socialized. That is the environment they were given to figure out who they are and what they want.
Not to mention that they know they have been handed the legacy of climate change which understandably makes them skeptical of outward displays of actually caring and cynical towards feelings that were already cheapened by commercials before they got exposed as completely insincere by the grown ups who just elected the slimiest most obvious troll possible as chief executive. The guy who constantly does all the things parents ask their kids not to do, elected president. Kids aren’t idiots. They see that and know you don’t mean it.
So no, these are not the healthiest circumstances for expressing one’s feelings.
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u/Jackal-Noble 13h ago
Correction : Researchers 'analyzed' by asking AI to scan the lyrics of 38,000 songs and provide them with a conclusion.
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u/QueenSqueee42 10h ago
The aample size included only 230 artists, many of whom are elderly now or have died. I'm not convinced that is an adequate data set to make these sweeping cultural statements.
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u/hacksoncode 5h ago
Huh... so an average of 165 songs per artist? Something... doesn't add up about that.
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u/RumJackson 2h ago
That doesn’t seem too unreasonable.
The Beatles were only together for 7 years and wrote 200+ songs. Bob Dylan has 40 released albums with 600+ songs.
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u/Aesthete18 11h ago
Well depends on the definition of pop. If you're talking all the big dogs like Taylor Swift and such, I would assume it's all just key phrases for hooks but indie pop, singer songwriter stuff have a lot of depth imo
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u/1Steelghost1 10h ago
That jay-z quote/ lyric is so relevant. Basically said what ever he puts out people will buy and he makes dumb watered down songs on purpose knowing people will buy them no matter what they actually say.
Hell a few years ago there was six months where the trending tiktok song was eminim rapping about killing strippers.
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u/Strange-Movie 9h ago
I feel like this is more due to a specific mainstream, low risk, style that’s become omnipresent due to digital proliferation; whatever is least specific but appeals to the most people will be “popular”
Listen to indie music, specific feelings and emotion are spread throughout
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u/Low_Lavishness_8776 9h ago
This made me curious about other changes in lyrics. Apparently, another change is increasing focus on the self https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1132558 https://nautil.us/me-myself-and-i-the-increasing-narcissism-of-western-music-1282220
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u/Disastrous-Road184 8h ago
Almost, as if we already knew, art reflects reality. How revelatory: study confirms what we’ve known for centuries through other studies!
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u/Friendly-World-5273 8h ago
Anecdotally I can at least still find music I can connect with emotionally, but now let’s do the wasteland that is modern film! The only word I can find do justice to our modern filmmaking landscape is “sterile”.
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u/frank_datank_ 8h ago
“The final dataset includes 38,467 songs from 230 artists spanning close to a century of popular music from 1947 to 2024”
So an average of 162 songs per artist? Seems like a lot, and that it’d be better to have a more diverse artist selection if you’re trying to show trends
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u/other_half_of_elvis 8h ago
I worked at an all day pop concert about 10 years ago. My first thought was, these aren't songs, they are advertisements. Jingles. All hook and no message, story, or intent. Obviously I was generalizing but seeing hours of it all at once was overwhelming.
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u/MrMilesDavis 7h ago
Hearing that whiney Jelly Roll song for 2.5 years in public definitely felt like a phenomenon
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u/Due_Job781 7h ago
Anxiety (fear) is an emotion. How would the inclusion of anxiety and stress mean less emotional depth?
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u/MrBrightSide2407365 5h ago
I thought that was obvious. Music has gone down hill since the turn of the millennium.
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u/theoreticaljerk 5h ago
As I get older I find myself listening to more and more small artists that most people have never heard of.
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u/TarArov 4h ago
There is a fascinating cultural shift in how we commodify our collective misery through modern songwriting,, Older music used to channel raw,, everyday grievances into universally relatable melodies that could literally be about anything,, Today,, it feels like the charts are strictly split between hyper-individualistic bragging,, institutional venting wrapped in therapy speak,, or completely algorithmic AI corporate sludge,,
This polarization suggests that we have lost the art of the mundane complaint in popular art,, When emotional expression becomes either hyper-curated branding or fully automated generation,, it hollows out authentic connection,, It makes you wonder if our current cultural landscape is even capable of producing a messy,, organic human anthem anymore
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u/cprz 3h ago
They’d have a blast with Finnish song lyrics. The depth has somewhat improved in my opinion and there has always been popular artists here who do really ”lightweight” songs and artists who do more like songs with some story with some emotional depth. Sometimes it’s even a combination of something funnysounding with deep lyrics.
In the 80’s ”Stand by me” was translated to ”Mut murhaa” (Murder me). In the 70’s ”Stayin’ Alive” was translated to ”Elää mä sain” (I got to live/I was alive). Just the normal translations from the happiest country.
I think studies like that really kinda forgot the money making aspect of song writing where the fast paced and catchy songs become more popular (easier) nowadays. Also fitting big stories in few words can be understood in multiple ways, and really the study should be done so that they’d also interview as many artists as possible. Could maybe change their thinkin and results quite a bit.
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u/Sweet-Emu-7698 2h ago
That started in the 90s when the shift in rock music went from party lyrics to whiney lyrics.
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u/Bzr21 10h ago
Many old school pop / rock song lyrics were just silly. Lead singers / lyricists as diverse as Mick Jagger and Jon Anderson ( of YES fame ) admitted that they often put certain words into songs just because they happened to fit tonally within the piece - but otherwise had no real meaning - there were many others who did the same ..
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u/heereewegooo 4h ago
Everything is a corporate manufactured product now, designed to sell. It’s not really art anymore.
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u/taco_jones 13h ago
Anxiety and stress aren't emotionally deep?
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u/chikanishing 10h ago
“More nuanced patterns emerged, with declines in sadness but increases in anxiety-related language over time”
does not imply to me that the authors aren’t counting anxiety as emotion, just that it increased as overall levels of emotional language decreased.
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