People Prefer Simpler Content When There Are More Choices: A Time Series Analysis of Lyrical Complexity in Six Decades of American Popular Music

Michael E. W. PhD Varnum, Jaimie Krems, Colin Morris and Igor Grossmann
Additional contact information
Michael E. W. PhD Varnum: Arizona State University
Igor Grossmann: University of Waterloo

No nmruj, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of shifting norms, affect, and values at the cultural level. One remarkable, recently-uncovered trend is that successful pop songs have increasingly simple lyrics. Why? We test the idea that increasing lyrical simplicity is linked to a widening array of novel song choices. To test this Cultural Compression Hypothesis (CCH), we examined six decades of popular music (N = 14,661 songs). The number of novel song choices predicted greater lyrical simplicity of successful songs. This relationship was robust, holding when controlling for critical ecological and demographic factors and also when using a variety of approaches to account for the potentially confounding influence of temporal autocorrelation. The present data provide the first time series evidence that real-world cultural transmission may depend on the amount of novel choices in the information landscape.

Date: 2019-12-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5defe6ea9bd131000c12fb09/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:nmruj

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/nmruj

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().