New research from Michigan State University finds that popular music has gradually become less explicit about emotion and relationships — both across generations of artists and within artists’ careers.
The study, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, is the largest of its kind to analyze song lyrics. The final dataset includes 38,467 songs from 230 artists spanning close to a century of popular music from 1947 to 2024. Discographies were manually checked by a team of roughly 30 research assistants after the initial lyric collection.
“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 Jan Brascamp, co-author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “By looking at both at once, we can begin separating changes that happen within artists from broader shifts in culture and the music industry.”
The study found that lyrics became less emotional and less socially focused over time. Within artists’ careers, both positive and negative words declined, as did references to family and friends. Specific shifts show that anxiety-related language increased while sadness declined in lyrics.
The researchers found similar historical patterns when comparing artists from different eras. These broader historical differences were generally larger than the changes that occurred within individual artists’ careers.
Of the 230 artists, Willie Nelson had the greatest number of songs while Miles Davis had the fewest with lyrics. Classic soul and early rock artists, like Marvin Gaye and The Supremes, tended to rank highly on positive emotion and social references, whereas artists more countercultural genres, like Nine Inch Nails and Sex Pistols, often appear at the lower ends. Negative- and sadness-related categories are disproportionately represented by older country and blues artists, like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.
The researchers were surprised to find that song lyrics do not map neatly onto ordinary psychological aging.
“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 Logan Gibson, lead-author and MSU research associate. “Instead, positive emotions and social references declined. That suggests song lyrics may be strongly shaped by artistic, cultural or industry-level forces.”
The researchers hope this study shows how large collections of everyday cultural products from songs, books, social media and films can be used to study how people express emotion and how relationships change over time.
“Music is not just entertainment. People use songs to regulate their emotions, understand themselves, develop their identities and feel connected to other people. That makes lyrics an interesting record of what artists — and potentially the audiences and cultures around them — are choosing to talk about,” said William Chopik, co-author and former associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “So, when we see large-scale declines in emotional and social language, it raises interesting questions about whether the way we express feelings and relationships has changed more broadly."