The lyrics of modern-day music has become more repetitive over the past 40 years, a new study has found.
The study published in the journal Scientific Reports found that lyrics of English-language songs have not just become more repetitive, but also simpler over the past four decades.
Lead author Eva Zangerle and colleagues came to these findings by analyzing lyrics of 12,000 English-language songs across a variety of genres. These included rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock songs. In total there were 2,400 songs per genre, and they were all released between 1980 and 2020.
Overall, the researchers found that lyrics became simpler as the years went on. They became easier to understand and the number of different words in the songs also decreased, the study reported.
Rap songs however, were a slightly different story. Since 1980, the authors found that the lyrics in rap songs contained more words with three or more syllables.
While this may be true, however, the general simplicity of rap songs has still increased, as has the receptiveness.
"Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music," the authors write in the study. "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."
The authors believe the increased simplicity of music reflects how people consume music in the modern day, and how songs are being used increasingly as background noise.
The meaning behind lyrics also appears to have changed, the authors report.
"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," the authors write.
Overall, emotionally positive and negative words increased in rap songs throughout the study period, while emotionally negative lyrics increased for other genres such as R&B, pop and country, the study reported.
In total, all genres showed an increase in angry words.
"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," the authors report.
The authors reached these findings by using the online song lyrics platform Genuis. The study overall shows a great evolution in music and the way it is consumed over the past 40 years.
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