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If you find your brain isn’t allowing you to memorize lyrics as you once did, that might be a good thing.
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A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports found that songs have gotten simpler, more repetitive and increasingly negative over the years.
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It also appears that people no longer have the appetite for anything lengthy and lyrical as researchers in Germany and Austria chalked it up to factors like incentives from streaming services, a rise in short-form videos on TikTok and people preferring to listen to background music.
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The team analyzed 12,000 English-language songs from various genres (hip hop, pop, country, rock and R&B) released between 1970 and 2020 to better understand how lyrical content has evolved and found that the growing repetition in tunes over the years resulted in less elaborate lyrics.
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Songs have also become more personal with pronouns such as “mine” and “me” becoming a more utilized option across nearly all genres, except country.
Emotions in songs have also changed with all genres using words linked to negative feelings with rap showing the biggest rise in anger, while emotionally negative lyrics increased in R&B, pop and country ditties.
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But lyrics also mattered most to rap listeners, though the “richness” of the genre’s vocabulary — described as the number of unique words used — was seen to decrease with time with researchers attributing the trend to rap songs’ tendency to repeat lines and rhymes.
The study noted song lyrics have historically been used as a form of literary work, using poetic devices like metaphors and imagery.
But you can’t get too flowery on shorter songs and as the years have gone by, the average length of songs from the Billboard Hot 11 has decreased from four minutes in the 1990s to about three minutes in the 2020s, according to a study by engineer Michael Tauberg, Billboard previously reported.
“The first 10 to 15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not,” Zangerle told AFP.
“Lyrics should stick easier nowadays, simply because they are easier to memorize.”
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