According to a study signed by pop culture specialist Daniel Parris and reflected in several international media, the charts are being tamed and the list of offensive or provocative lyrics has dropped surprisingly.
It is curious that in these times of so much polarization and hate on social networks, the lists of the fifty most listened to songs on Spotify reflect precisely the opposite.
It is pop with lyrics for all audiences that dominates the list, with only thirteen percent of the songs fitting the “parental advisory: explicit lyrics” label so common during the second half of the eighties and almost all of the nineties.
Still in use, “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content/Lyrics” is a parental advisory label included on the covers of audio recordings of artists or groups that contain lyrics that discuss “drug use, sexual content or references, violence, xenophobia, homophobia, racism or machismo, or simply include foul language.”
The label was introduced in 1987 by the Recording Industry Association of the United States and adopted by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) in 2011. Since then it has been included in physical formats, online music stores, video games, etc.
And the most curious thing is that this dynamic has changed after the pandemic, perhaps due to the barrage of bad news to which we are regularly subjected and hate speech on social networks.
In 2018, it is estimated that around 74-75% of the songs in Spotify’s Top 50 carried the “explicit lyrics” label, compared to 13% today.
Everything leads us to indicate that listening is moving towards more pop and more “radio-friendly” songs, with rap and metal – usual creditors of the label – not so present among the top positions on the charts.
Parris’s analysis suggests that listeners are now heading towards gentler and more poppy songs with the classic “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac with excellent representative of current listening trends. Parris launches ideas such as that, after so much time since the creation of the label, the industry has “sanitized” the lists and the algorithms have used the “parental advisory” as a label for their metadata that has possibly affected changes in listening habits in the lists.
