Debating the merits of today’s popular music versus the hits of the past is largely a matter of taste. But regardless of your opinion on the subject, one thing is clear: pop music is objectively darker and more stressful than ever.
The compelling statistics are laid out in a study by University of Vienna psychologists recently published in the journal Scientific Reports. After compiling every weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1973 and 2023, the team used standard preprocessing methods to break down the lyrics of 20,186 songs. They then fed these lyrics into a customized algorithm to assess the songs based on their positive or negative sentiments.
As they predicted, the researchers identified a “substantial increase in stress-related and negative language” over the last five decades. Additionally, it appears that hit lyrics in the United States have steadily simplified over the years. According to the study’s authors, these findings correlate to rising rates of reported depression and anxiety, as well as past research into increased negativity in both news media and fiction books.
However, there were some unexpected discoveries in the team’s review. First, they didn’t pinpoint any clear associations between the increasingly dark and stressed songs and shifts in median household income. Secondly, major traumatic societal events including September 11, 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t result in even bleaker songs. On the contrary, these crises appear to have produced upticks in more positive, lyrically complex pop songs.
“Surprisingly, societal shocks like COVID-19 coincided with attenuations rather than amplifications of these trends, indicating a preference for emotion-incongruent music,” the team wrote, although they stopped short of directly linking the two subjects.
“While the study applies a quasi-experimental, interrupted time-series approach to examine changes surrounding major societal events, the analyses remain observational in nature,” they added. “Thus, any observed differences before and after events such as 9/11 or COVID-19 represent temporal associations, not definitive causal effects.”
Regardless of subject matter or complexity, the researchers believe that their findings highlight the importance of music in society—especially its ability to help listeners process and navigate an often difficult world.
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