“DIE WITH a smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars was the anthem of 2025. The soppy ballad climbed charts in more than 30 countries and became the longest-running daily number-one song on Spotify, a streaming platform. Its appeal owes something to its mood: pop music has grown gloomier. Sad sells.
In an analysis for The Economist, MusixMatch, an analytics company, gathered lyrics from the Billboard top 100 songs for each week of the past few decades. Using AI tools, the company assigned moods to each track. The share of hits with lyrics invoking “angst” increased by 13 percentage points in the past two decades. This puts it neck and neck with “heartbreak”, long a pop staple, which has been on the rise of late, too. “Despair” also began to increase sharply after 2020. Now around a quarter of songs in the top 100 have lyrics that hint at misery—think of moody hits by Sam Smith or Billie Eilish.
Analysing Billboard charts since 1973, authors of a recent analysis published in Scientific Reports also show that lyrical “stress” has risen steadily, while positivity has declined. Both data sets measure Billboard hits, not every song released. It is possible there are lots of cheerful tunes not measured because angsty young people are instead streaming songs that match their moods. If pop sounds bluer than it used to, the issue may lie not with the artists but with listless listeners.■
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