Scientists analyzed 38,467 songs released from 1947 to 2024 and found that lyrics have steadily lost their feelings, except for one emotion that kept growing

Music is supposed to be where people put their feelings: heartbreak, longing, joy, the people they love. A team at Michigan State University wanted to see whether that is still true. With the help of about 30 research assistants, they collected the lyrics of 38,467 songs by 230 artists, from Willie Nelson to Miles Davis, spanning 1947 to 2024, and measured the language in every one. The feelings were fading. One was not.

Over the decades, song lyrics became less emotional and less focused on other people. Words expressing positive feelings and negative feelings both became less common, and so did references to family and friends. The one exception was anxiety. Anxiety-related words increased, while sadness-related words declined.

In other words, popular songs today say less about joy, grief and the people in a singer’s life, and more about worry.

The same shift happened inside individual careers. As artists got older and released more albums, their lyrics followed the same pattern, losing emotional and social language and gaining anxiety. The changes between musical eras were bigger than the changes within any one career, but both pointed the same way.

That second result surprised the researchers. “People often become more emotionally regulated and invest more in meaningful relationships as they age, so we might expect that lyrics become more positive or relational across an artists’ career,” said lead author Logan Gibson, a research associate at Michigan State. “Instead, positive emotions and social references declined.”

Earlier studies have tracked song lyrics before, mostly in hit charts. A 2011 study of Billboard Hot 100 songs from 1980 to 2007 found rising self-focus and fewer words about positive emotion over time. A 2019 analysis of 50 years of song lyrics found negative emotion rising and positive emotion falling.

The new study agrees that positive language is fading, but disagrees on sadness, which went down rather than up. The difference may come from the samples. Earlier work looked mostly at the year’s biggest hits, while this study followed the full catalogues of well-known artists, including songs that never charted.

“A lot of previous work has asked whether music changes across decades, but much less has examined whether the same artists change across the course of their careers,” said co-author Jan Brascamp, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State.

The researchers used computer text analysis to count words linked to emotions, relationships and other themes in every song. Because they had many albums from each artist, they could separate two things that usually get mixed together: changes across generations of musicians, and changes as the same musician ages.

Why would lyrics lose their feelings? The authors note that the career pattern does not match how people normally change with age, so they suggest it reflects artistic, cultural or industry forces rather than personal growth. Music written for streaming playlists and background listening, for example, may reward a different kind of lyric than songs written to be studied line by line, though the study did not test any specific cause.

The researchers hope the approach will be used on other everyday cultural products, from books and films to social media, to track how people express emotion and relationships over time.

There are limits to what this shows. Word counts capture what lyrics say explicitly, not tone, irony or what the music itself expresses. A song can sound heartbreaking without using the word sad. The study covered 230 well-known artists, not all of popular music, so the results may not apply to every genre or to music outside the English-speaking world.

Source

Gibson LC, Brascamp J, et al. “Changes in social and emotional content in song lyrics across popular artists’ discographies.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2026.
DOI: 10.1037/aca0000905

Also cited

DeWall CN, Pond RS, Campbell WK, Twenge JM. “Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2011.
DOI: 10.1037/a0023045

Brand CO, Acerbi A, Mesoudi A. “Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics.” Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2019.
DOI: 10.1017/ehs.2019.11