Study of 38,000+ Songs Reveals Lyrics Are Losing Feeling

Popular music has quietly drifted away from the language of the heart. A new study from Michigan State University reports that song lyrics have become steadily less explicit about emotion and relationships over nearly eight decades, both across generations of artists and within the careers of individual musicians. The findings, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, draw on one of the largest lyric datasets ever assembled and suggest that the words people sing to one another reflect cultural currents that run far deeper than any single performer’s personal journey.

The research team analyzed 38,467 songs from 230 artists, spanning popular music from 1947 to 2024. That window covers close to a century of recorded songwriting, from the postwar era of crooners and big bands through rock and roll, soul, punk, hip hop, and the digital streaming age. The dataset is the largest of its kind to be subjected to this kind of psychological analysis of song lyrics. Crucially, the initial lyric collection was not simply trusted as delivered. A team of roughly 30 research assistants manually checked each artist’s discography after the automated collection stage, a labor-intensive verification process that gives the final numbers a level of reliability rare in large-scale text studies.

What the team found is a consistent downward trend in emotional and social language. Lyrics became less emotional and less socially focused over time. Within individual artists’ careers, both positive and negative emotion words declined, as did references to family and friends. The specific categories shifted in different directions: anxiety-related language increased over the study period, while sadness-related language declined. The pattern held when the researchers compared artists from different eras, and those broader historical differences between generations of musicians were generally larger than the changes that occurred within any single artist’s career.

The dataset also preserves vivid snapshots of particular eras. Of the 230 artists, country legend Willie Nelson had the greatest number of songs in the analysis, while jazz icon Miles Davis had the fewest with lyrics, a reminder that the study measures words rather than musical influence. Classic soul and early rock artists such as Marvin Gaye and The Supremes tended to rank highly on positive emotion and social references, their lyrics dense with the vocabulary of love, longing, and connection. Artists from more countercultural genres, like Nine Inch Nails and the Sex Pistols, often appeared at the lower ends of those same measures. Negative- and sadness-related categories were disproportionately represented by older country and blues artists, including Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, whose catalogs carry the plain-spoken grief of mid-century American songwriting.

Perhaps the most surprising result is what the lyrics did not do. Psychological research on aging consistently shows that people tend to become more emotionally regulated and invest more in meaningful relationships as they grow older. If lyrics were primarily a mirror of the individual mind, songwriters should grow warmer and more relational as their careers mature. Instead, the opposite occurred. Positive emotions and social references declined within artists’ careers, a reversal of ordinary psychological aging that points strongly toward artistic, cultural, or industry-level forces shaping what songwriters choose to say.

Jan Brascamp, co-author of the study and associate professor in MSU’s Department of Psychology, explained that the dual design is what makes the study distinctive. A lot of previous work has asked whether music changes across decades, he noted, but much less has examined whether the same artists change across the course of their careers. By looking at both at once, the researchers can begin separating changes that happen within artists from broader shifts in culture and the music industry. That separation matters, because it transforms a simple observation about lyrics into a question about the forces that produce them.

Logan Gibson, the study’s lead author and an MSU research associate, emphasized how far the lyrics diverge from expectations based on individual development. People often become more emotionally regulated and invest more in meaningful relationships as they age, Gibson observed, so one might expect lyrics to become more positive or relational across an artist’s career. Instead, positive emotions and social references declined. That divergence, Gibson argued, suggests song lyrics may be strongly shaped by artistic, cultural, or industry-level pressures rather than by the personal maturation of the people writing them.

William Chopik, co-author and former associate professor in the Department of Psychology, framed the stakes in terms of what lyrics actually are. Music is not just entertainment, Chopik noted. 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. When large-scale declines in emotional and social language appear across nearly a century of popular music, Chopik said, it raises interesting questions about whether the way people express feelings and relationships has changed more broadly.

Beyond the specific findings about music, the researchers hope the study demonstrates the power of large collections of everyday cultural products. Songs, books, social media posts, and films can all be mined at scale to study how people express emotion and how relationships change over time. Lyrics occupy a special place in that landscape because they are deliberately crafted, publicly performed, and emotionally charged, sitting at the intersection of private feeling and public expression. A dataset spanning 77 years offers a longitudinal record no survey or diary study could match.

The study leaves open the question of what is driving the decline. The researchers did not identify a single cause, and the divergence between lyrical trends and ordinary psychological aging suggests the answer lies in forces outside the individual mind: shifts in genre conventions, changes in the music industry, evolving audience tastes, or broader cultural movements in how emotion and relationships are discussed. What the analysis establishes is the pattern itself, measured across nearly a century of popular song and verified song by song. Whether the words we sing are becoming less feelingful because artists have changed, because the industry has changed, or because the culture around them has changed is now a question that can be asked with real evidence in hand.

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Keywords: lyrics, emotion, psychology, music, Michigan State University, songs, finds, losing, feeling, scientific research