Pop is sadder than it was, according to science
In the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, researchers have found that, over the last 50 years, pop hits have become longer, slower and sadder, with far more existing in “ambiguous emotional states”.
Measuring the speed, length and key of mainstream pop, psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg and sociologist Christian von Scheve found that today’s music is more likely to be over four minutes long, slow and in a minor key than when life expectancy was shorter and the only “depression” people talked about was “Great”.
Interestingly, the decrease in tempo is most pronounced for major chord tracks (which halved since the 60s), indicating “a general reduction in unambiguously happy-sounding recordings as well as an increase in recordings with ambiguous emotional states.”
