ArticlePloS one2021
Why are song lyrics becoming simpler? a time series analysis of lyrical complexity in six decades of American popular music.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolution of moral expression in song lyrics.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Coronavirus-Related Searches on the Internet Predict COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in the Real World: A Behavioral Immune System Perspective.Social psychological and personality science · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture's shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplicity is accompanied by a widening array of novel song choices. We do so by using six decades (1958-2016) of popular music in the United States (N = 14,661 songs), controlling for multiple well-studied ecological and cultural factors plausibly linked to shifts in lyrical simplicity (e.g., resource availability, pathogen prevalence, rising individualism). In years when more novel song choices were produced, the average lyrical simplicity of the songs entering U.S. billboard charts was greater. This cross-temporal relationship was robust when controlling for a range of cultural and ecological factors and employing multiverse analyses to control for potentially confounding influence of temporal autocorrelation. Finally, simpler songs entering the charts were more successful, reaching higher chart positions, especially in years when more novel songs were produced. The present results suggest that cultural transmission depends on the amount of novel choices in the information landscape.
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