Song Lyrics Really Are Getting Simpler and More Repetitive, Study Finds
An assessment of hundreds of thousands of songs confirms that choruses and hooks have taken over—but simpler isn’t necessarily worse
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When comparing today’s hit tunes with the top 40 of past decades, strong opinions are never in short supply. Every generation seems to lament its successor’s musical tastes and listening habits. Though science can’t necessarily account for such subjective preferences or generational divides, new research suggests popular music has indeed undergone some measurable and significant shifts over the past 50 years—with popular song lyrics becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports.
“There’s more rhyming lines and also more chorus,” says the study’s senior author Eva Zangerle, a computer scientist at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, who has developed music recommendation algorithms. “We basically found that lyrics [have gotten] easier to comprehend.” This trend, observed across five of the most popular English-language music genres (pop, rock, rap, R&B and country) since 1970, hints at how shifts in music listening habits, platforms and production may be shaping pop culture.
Zangerle and her co-authors compiled lyrics from 353,320 well-known songs released between 1970 and 2020. They used machine learning to single out these songs’ key linguistic features, such as the ratio of repeated words, the types of emotional cues, a readability score and the richness of vocabulary. Then they developed and trained additional models to sort and analyze those features across years in a representative subset of 12,000 songs.
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