Associated with the Linz Institute of Technology and the Institute of Computational Perception @ JKU Linz, Austria

Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades

SciRep_2024 Teaser

Abstract

Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity. We find that pop music lyrics have become simpler and easier to comprehend over time: not only does the lexical complexity of lyrics decrease (for instance, captured by vocabulary richness or readability of lyrics), but we also observe that the structural complexity (for instance, the repetitiveness of lyrics) has decreased. In addition, we confirm previous analyses showing that the emotion described by lyrics has become more negative and that lyrics have become more personal over the last five decades. Finally, a comparison of lyrics view counts and listening counts shows that when it comes to the listeners’ interest in lyrics, for instance, rock fans mostly enjoy lyrics from older songs; country fans are more interested in new songs’ lyrics.


Citation

Emilia Parada-Cabaleiro, Maximilian Mayerl, Stefan Brandl, Marcin Skowron, Markus Schedl, Elisabeth Lex, Eva Zangerle
Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades
Scientific Reports, 14(1): 5531, doi:10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x, 2024.

BibTeX

@article{Parada-Cabaleiro2024SciRep_2024,
    title = {Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades},
    author = {Parada-Cabaleiro, Emilia and Mayerl, Maximilian and Brandl, Stefan and Skowron, Marcin and Schedl, Markus and Lex, Elisabeth and Zangerle, Eva},
    journal = {Scientific Reports},
    doi = {10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x},
    volume = {14},
    number = {1},
    pages = {5531},
    issn = {2045-2322},
    month = {Mar},
    day = {28},
    year = {2024}
}