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  2. Valentine's Day reality check: pop songs are sadder now than in the 1960s.

2 January 2020

Valentine's Day reality check: pop songs are sadder now than in the 1960s.

"... the usage of ‘love’ ...practically halved in 50 years... ‘hate’, on the contrary, which until the 1990s was not even mentioned in any of the (Billboard) top-100 songs, is now used between 20 and 30 times each year."

 


Two clever UK-University-professor-types run us through the cold reality of modern pop music. Yes, positive happy songs still dominate the pop tunes you're playing in your business, but negative lyrics are creeping into the charts in a big way.

You don't want to depress your customers, so do you need to look more closely at the songs on your playlists? Is the radio station playing sad-ish pop songs - do you need to take more control with your own music choices?

Yes and no. The experts say "...broader, societal changes could have contributed to make it more acceptable, or even rewarded, to explicitly express negative feelings."

They say the likely explanation of this trend is that in humankind "... negative information appears to be remembered and transmitted more than neutral or positive information".

For more tips read our resource, Presto! by clicking  the button below.

Read Presto! guide

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