Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?
In 1977, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper called The Complexity of Songs, which is basically one long joke about the repetitive lyrics of newfangled music (example quote: "the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced").
I'm going to try to test this hypothesis with data. I'll be analyzing the repetitiveness of a dataset of 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2017.
I know a repetitive song when I hear one, but translating that intuition into a number isn't easy. One thing we might try is looking at the number of unique words in a song, as a fraction of the total number of words. But this metric would call the following lyric excerpts equally repetitive:
baby I don't need dollar bills to have fun tonight I love cheap thrills baby I don't need dollar bills to have fun tonight I love cheap thrills I don't need no money as long as I can feel the beat I don't need no money as long as I keep dancing
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