The Troubling Trend Hiding In America’s Favorite Songs

Sadness is fading from popular music — but so is joy.

Instead, artists’ lyrics grow more anxious over the course of their careers, and newer artists write with more anger than their predecessors, according to a new study.

Analyzing 38,467 songs by 230 popular artists, a Michigan State University study tracked music trends across genres from 1947 to 2024 and found that most songs over the last 80 years have become less emotional, less happy, and more angry.

“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,” StudyFinds wrote. The study pointed to older artists like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline who ranked at the top of the list for sad songs. 

“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,” the outlet noted.

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The report also found that lyrics spoke less about social relationships, particularly friendships, but mentions of family declined as well.

The authors said they could not pin down why the lyrical content appears to change over an artist’s career, but suggest broader forces may be at work.

William Chopik, co-author and former associate professor in the Department of Psychology, said music is a way people express and understand themselves.

“Music is not just entertainment. People use songs to regulate their emotions, understand themselves, develop their identities, and feel connected to other people,” he said in a statement. “That makes lyrics an interesting record of what artists — and potentially the audiences and cultures around them — are choosing to talk about.” 

“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,” he added.

Logan Gibson, the lead author and MSU research associate, said that people often become more invested in meaningful relationships as they age, so researchers would expect to see lyrics become more positive or relational over a career.

“Instead, positive emotions and social references declined,” he said. “That suggests song lyrics may be strongly shaped by artistic, cultural, or industry-level forces.”

The study, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, pulled artists from six all-time lists, including Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Business Insider. Using a word-counting program that analyzed the lyrics of each song, it placed words into categories like positivity, sadness, anger, and anxiety.

The researchers also noted that the program could not detect sarcasm or irony, and that many artists do not write their own lyrics, so it may not accurately reflect them personally.

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