Overview
- In late June 2026, a peer‑reviewed study from Queen Mary University published in Scientific Reports reported that popular English‑language lyrics shifted from words tied to care and purity toward words tied to harm, cheating, subversion and degradation between 1960 and 2023.
- The team analysed more than 380,000 songs by combining the WASABI corpus with Billboard year‑end chart entries and used AI and language models trained on moral‑foundation categories to quantify trends across the six moral dimensions.
- In the Billboard subset vice‑related language rose sharply and care and purity fell by more than 20 percent, and the study found clear variation by genre and attributed artist gender, with metal scoring high on harm and degradation and R&B/soul scoring higher on care.
- The authors and coverage stress key limits: the sample is English and chart‑focused, artist gender was encoded in binary categories, the AI models struggled to interpret fairness and some genre contexts, and the analysis is correlational so it does not establish music as the cause of social change.
- A separate University of Vienna study reported simpler, more negative and stress‑related lyrics since the 1970s, which reinforces the Queen Mary findings and suggests researchers should watch how songwriting, genre shifts and industry pressures may shape what listeners hear.