Is Pop Music Getting Less Intelligent?

Its been proven that repeating short phrases results in a catchier tune. The impact marketing has made on music is terrible to say the least. In recent years especially it has become more about what sells that what has emotional resonance.

Has pop music been getting stupider? Was it ever intelligent? Probably not. I think the issue is pop music is more common now than ever as only handfuls of artists can afford a solid marketing budget.

So, the post says that pop lyrics are getting stupider because the ratio of unique words to total words has went down, though both total words and unique words have gone up. I'm not very convinced. How do you know that the right metric isn't something like unique/sqrt(total)? Can we figure out the right metric from first principles?

I think the article may have provided evidence for the opposite of what the author seems to believe:

"My results confirmed what Briggs had described: unique words and total words have risen over time, but the ratio has gone down significantly. This would suggest that pop lyrics have in fact gotten less eloquent."

I'd have to disagree... this just implies that modern pop songs are more lyrically repetitive, which is not immediately a sign of "less intelligence". It may be less enjoyable to some of us or you might call it "more insipid", but given the definition of intelligence (italicized because that's an important phrase in this paragraph) chosen at the beginning, it's still pulling from a larger vocabulary, and that still implies higher intelligence by the definition.

"Smarter people putting out more repetitive/insipid music" doesn't seem too shocking a result to me... the intelligence of a songwriter puts an upper bound on the intelligence of the song they can produce, but no lower bound.

There are still some confounding factors that could be at play though: Increased ethnic/cultural diversity could simply be introducing significantly more slang vocabularies into the songs. Rather than implying that any one performer is using a larger vocabulary, that would simply imply a certain dialectal diaspora, which wouldn't prove anything about the individual musicians.

So, now the part where I question the definition of intelligence being used. "Vocabulary size" isn't a bad choice of proxy for at least a fun analysis, but perhaps instead of graphing the years as a whole, each song should be analyzed for things like word count, then we can look at the population statistics instead of the summed words. If the individual songs are as a whole using more vocabulary, I would consider that stronger evidence than if the songs all turn out merely to have dialect differences. In fact it's completely mathematically possible for the set of all Top 50 songs in later years to use more different words as a whole even as each individual song is simpler than the individual songs of the past.

And, if this really was a real effect, if word gets back to the pop song creators, the very act of observing the vocabulary has gotten more difficult could well cause the pop songs to get simpler over the next few years....

I dunno... I quite like that song. It feels like a good example of psychedelic pop.

Similarly, there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uo9tMoew6o (Yummy Yummy Yummy by Ohio Express) which has fairly silly lyrics, but it's undeniably a good (ie, catchy) pop song.

Pop music from 1959 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgaZZl_GVg

Pop music is stupid because it's catchy. It's always been that way, always will be.