Popular Music Is Losing Both Its Heartache And Its Happiness

Popular Music Is Growing Less Sad, but Not Any Happier

Growing older is often expected to bring a sunnier outlook. Psychology research has found that people tend to become more emotionally steady with age and to lean toward positive experiences. A new analysis of 38,467 songs found that popular musicians followed only half of that script. Across the span of a career, heartache faded from lyrics, but joyful words faded too.

Across decades, the shift looked different. Artists who broke through more recently wrote with less sadness and more anger than artists who debuted decades earlier. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Janis Joplin, all stars of earlier decades, ranked near the top for sadness among the 230 acts studied, a group that runs from Elvis Presley to Taylor Swift.

Researchers at Michigan State University call the match with psychology’s expectations mixed. Aging, shifting audience tastes, commercial pressure, and changing industry norms are all candidates for the cause. According to the authors, “The present data cannot determine why lyrical content changes across artists’ careers.”

A Study of 38,467 Song Lyrics Finds Emotion Fading

Earlier research mostly tracked either trends across all songs or single artists. Studies of the Beatles found lyrics turned darker and less about love over the group’s career, while Dolly Parton’s lyrics grew more positive. Published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, this study set out to test whether a broader pattern exists. First came a simple question: who counts as a popular artist? Instead of choosing favorites, the researchers pulled from six all-time lists, including rankings from Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Business Insider. Any act in the top 100 of any list made the cut, and purely instrumental acts were dropped because they had no words to analyze.

Next came the lyrics. For each artist, the team collected every studio album, skipping greatest-hits packages, live records, and remixes. Lyrics came mostly from the lyric site Genius.com, and about 30 trained research assistants checked each discography for missing or incorrect songs. The final collection held 3,531 albums released between 1947 and 2024. Willie Nelson supplied the most material, with 78 albums and 930 songs.

Artists ranged from early rhythm and blues pioneers to contemporary pop and hip-hop stars. Roughly two-thirds of the acts were solo performers, and about one-third were female artists. Close to three-quarters of the songs came from American acts.

A word-counting program did the heavy lifting. For every song, it calculated what share of the words belonged to categories like positive emotion, sadness, anger, anxiety, family, and friends. To separate career changes from changes across decades, the researchers compared each artist’s later songs with their own earlier ones while also tracking the year each career began.

Song Lyrics Lose Emotion and Family Mentions as Careers Progress

Within careers, positive and negative emotion words both dropped at similar rates, and sadness appeared to account for most of the negative drop while words tied to anxiety crept upward. Fading sadness fits research showing people pay less attention to negative things as they age. Falling positivity and rising anxiety do not fit that research.

Among social words, family references fell the most, and friend references declined as well, even though research points to adults investing in closer friendships and family bonds over time. One speculative explanation from the authors is that social circles tend to shrink with age, which may turn attention inward. A related, untested possibility is that fame and touring crowd out everyday friendships, leaving fewer of them to write about.

Friend Mentions in Song Lyrics Have Fallen Faster Than Family Mentions

Across decades, positive and negative emotion words again declined at comparable rates. Friend references fell faster than family references, though both slid. According to the authors, shifts across decades were generally larger than changes inside individual careers, which hints that broad cultural forces may matter more than an artist’s own growth.

Genre Barely Changes How Song Lyrics Shift Over Time

Individual artists differed widely. Curtis Mayfield, The Supremes, and Marvin Gaye ranked among the heaviest users of positive words, while Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, and Public Enemy ranked among the lightest. Genre shaped the average tone more than the trend. Compared with pop, R&B and soul songs used more positive and more social language, while metal leaned toward negative emotion, anxiety, and anger. But when the researchers tested whether genre changed how lyrics shifted over time, only 13 of 192 comparisons showed any difference, a rate close to what random luck alone would produce. Artist gender, home country, and solo versus group status were also mostly unrelated to how emotional or social the lyrics were.

Word counting has blind spots. The program cannot detect sarcasm or irony, so a bitter song with cheerful-sounding words would still score as upbeat. As the authors note, “lyrics are often more symbolic than literal.” Many performers also do not write all of their own material, so the researchers treated lyrics as the public face of each act, not a diary.

Heartache is fading from the lyrics of popular artists, and joy is not taking its place. The pattern held broadly across rock, rap, country, and soul alike, which points to forces beyond any single genre, possibly industry-wide pressures.

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Disclaimer: This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only. It is not medical, psychological, or professional advice, and the results of a single study should not be treated as conclusive.

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