It’s not so much my skin or my increasingly creaking knees ― the thing that’s been making me feel old recently is my Spotify playlist.
From the Sugababes’ iconic Round Round to Buddy Holly’s Dearest and Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, most of the tunes on my most-played catalogue come from before this century (a lot of them from before I was even born).
The fear that I’ve become an insufferable, “they don’t make them like they used to” naysayer is real. But fellow cranks, take heart ― new research suggests that the belief isn’t all in our bitter, non-gen-Z heads.
What did the science say?
The study, published in Scientific Reports, analysed over 12,000 songs in the English language recorded over the past 40 years.
The researchers looked at rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock genres because those are the most popular ones.
They used listener data from last.fm and Genius’ lyric database to see how popular music’s lyrics have changed over time, looking at Genius page views to see whether listeners were interested in the lyrics in particular.
They assessed lyrics’ “lexical, linguistic, structural, rhyme, emotion, and complexity descriptors.”
And what did they find?
“In essence, we find that lyrics have become simpler over time regarding multiple aspects of lyrics: vocabulary richness, readability, complexity, and the number of repeated lines,” the paper reads.
They also found that as time went on, lyrics increasingly used words like “me” or “mine” and “the emotion described by lyrics has become more negative.”
As if that wasn’t enough, newer song lyrics tended to be more repetitive than their older counterparts, the study revealed.
So ― music’s worse?
That’s a bold claim.
The study only looked at lyrics ― try telling a classical music fan, or someone who listens to lyrics in languages they don’t speak (like K-pop), that words are a song’s only merit. (To be clear, the study never said they were).
But so far as general lyric trends go, it does seem some listeners ― particularly rock fans ― enjoy the oldies better, the study suggests. And across all genres, lyrics have gotten simpler, more repetitive, and more personal.
“What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape – from how music is sold to how music is produced,” senior study author Eva Zangerle says.
The paper’s authors point out that sites like TikTok, on which songs must offer an infectious in a matter of seconds to go viral, could be contributing to the trend.
They also theorised that the negative emotions, like increased anger, seen in songs are partly a “mirror of society” (not exactly music to our ears).