Is Music Making Us Miserable? The Silent Shift That’s Changing Society

The dark side of popular music

Pavle Marinkovic
Thought Thinkers
Published in
4 min readAug 12, 2024

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Image with Dall-E

Music just isn’t what it used to be.

You’ve probably heard this a million times…or felt it deep down. It’s a gut feeling, a sense of loss like something vital slipped away while we were too busy scrolling through our feeds. You can’t pinpoint it, but you know it’s different — and not in a good way.

Partly, this shift is driven by algorithm-generated beats and auto-tuned vocals that are polished to perfection but stripped of their humanity. Songs feel emotionally hollow.

But there’s another, more tangible shift: lyrics have changed painting our world in darker shades. The music that once lifted us is now dragging us down, and it lies in the words we’re soaking in every day. Remember, language creates reality.

The decline of cheerful tunes

Two researchers from the Lawrence Technological University set out to unravel how the lyrics in popular music have evolved from the 1950s to 2016. Have our favorite songs become more cheerful or depressing over the decades?

Spoiler: It’s not looking good.

The scientists grabbed the lyrics of over 6,000 Billboard Hot 100 songs, ran them through a…

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