Popular music lyrics and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

A limited amount of previous research suggests that deteriorating socioeconomic conditions may be associated with greater popularity of music lyrics featuring negative emotional content and references to relationships. The present research considered this in charting popular music before and during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. A dataset based on the song lyrics of the top-5 charting weekly songs in the United Kingdom and the United States from January 1999 to August 2020 was computer-analyzed for interpersonal variables, such as satisfaction and human interest, and positive and negative emotional valence. Results indicated lower satisfaction and human interest in lyrics in the United States and United Kingdom in the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the lyrics in charting songs in 2015–2019. The US charting songs in 2020 also saw higher leveling and negative emotional content, and, when considering monthly data from 1999 to 2020, there was a positive association between economic misery and the number of negatively valenced words. The findings broaden our understanding of the relationship between significant global events and trends in popular music.

Examining the Lyrical Content and Musical Features of a Crowd-Sourced, Australian Pandemic Playlist

“…Similarly, threatening circumstances in the United States between 1955 and 2003 (as evidenced by fluctuations in US unemployment rates and other economic indicators) were associated with a preference for songs that were longer, slower, dealt with meaningful issues, and were more comforting and romantic (Pettijohn & Sacco, 2009b). Putter et al (2022) also found that, from 1999-2020, a monthly measure of economic misery in the US was positively associated with the presence of negatively valenced lyrics in charting songs. Influxes in negatively valenced lyrics might reflect contrahedonic emotion regulation (increasing unpleasant emotions or decreasing pleasant emotions), which can be both useful (e.g., when used for reflection or introspection, or to garner feelings of connectedness) or harmful (e.g., when maintaining or increasing negative emotions leading to distress or impairments; Parrott, 2014).…”

“…The potentially contradictory predictions arising from two theoretical approaches previously discussed, absence of direct prior evidence, and idiosyncratic nature of the COVID pandemic, meant that we opted to approach the quantitative analyses as an exploratory study guided by the following two research questions: RQ2: How does the lyrical content of the pandemic playlist differ from charting popular music during the COVID-19 pandemic with respect to (a) interpersonal relationships and (b) valence? Putter et al (2022) found that charting songs during the start of the pandemic reflected greater social isolation and lower positive affect relative to pre-pandemic data, so it is possible that the pandemic playlist might differ from that within the chart data.…”

“…When considering the turbulent socioeconomic conditions of the first six months of COVID-19, lyrics of topcharting songs in the US and UK in March-August 2020 reflected a greater degree of social isolation and lower satisfaction compared to the charting music in the same period in 2015-2019; and charting music in the US during the beginning of the pandemic contained lyrics with lower incidence of positive affect relative to an average of the same months in 2015-2019 (Putter et al, 2022). Thus, music may reflect public sentiment.…”

“…Taken together, music functions as a useful tool for mood regulation and creating feelings of social connectedness and may reflect shifts in affective states in response to environmental circumstances. While previous research has examined either population-level chart data 1 (e.g., lyrical content in charting popular music -Putter et al, 2022) or individual listening behaviors (e.g., self-reported music choices - Vidas et al, 2021a), no research (to our knowledge) has directly compared data from both approaches to investigate whether the music that populations listen to during stressful socioeconomic events maps onto the music that individuals say they want to listen to when directly asked. The current article addresses this gap by presenting a two-part case study investigating the musical and lyrical features of a crowd-sourced playlist created in response to COVID-19 lockdown measures published in the Melbourne-based Australian newspaper, The Age, relative to charting songs in 2020 and 2021.…”

Song popularity and processing fluency of lyrics

“…A number of other recent studies have attempted to predict the sales chart performance of songs based on various structural and acoustic features of the music (e.g., Askin & Mauskapf, 2017;Herremans et al, 2014;Interiano et al, 2018;Ren & Kauffman, 2017;Zangerle et al, 2020) and lyrics (Dhanaraj & Logan, 2005;Putter et al, 2021;Raza & Nanath, 2020). However, two other studies of music popularity have considered variables similar to processing fluency.…”