Summary of Nature papers: Music is omnipresent in our daily lives, and lyrics play an important role when listening to music. However, the complex relationship between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the past decades, and genre-specific variations is still not fully understood. This study investigates the dynamics of English lyrics in Western popular music across five decades and his five genres, using a wide range of lyric descriptors such as lyric complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity.
We have noticed that pop music lyrics have become simpler and easier to understand over time. That is, not only the lexical complexity of the lyrics (e.g., captured by lexical richness and lyric readability) was reduced, but also the structural complexity (e.g., , lyric repetition) was reduced. Furthermore, we confirm previous analyzes showing that over the past 50 years, the emotions expressed by lyrics have become more negative and lyrics have become more personal. Finally, comparing the number of plays and the number of listens to lyrics reveals that, for example, when it comes to listener interest in lyrics, rock fans primarily enjoy the lyrics of older songs. Country fans are more interested in the lyrics of new songs.