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.
  • @jeffwEnglish
    5•7 months ago

    Two things stand out to me:

    This implies that the structure of lyrics is shifting towards containing more choruses than in the past, in turn contributing to higher repetitiveness of lyrics

    The two main data sources for our investigation are last.fm and Genius. Given the nature and history of these platforms, in particular last.fm, the studied LFM-2b dataset is affected by community bias and popularity bias.

    So, what we’re really looking at is that popular songs (those that withstood the test of time, not necessarily popularity on release) of yesteryear were more complicated. So, this basically just confirms that we only care about the good music from the past and we forget the boring and repetitive stuff. And not even necessarily more complicated, just fewer repetitions of the chorus. I’d care more about a comparison that controls for chorus repetition and chart position/popularity