Songs About Sex Are Hot Sellers

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

James C. McKinley Jr reports for the [I]New York Times[/I], 4 Oct 2011:

[url]http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/this-just-in-study-shows-songs-about-sex-are-hot-sellers/[/url]

Psychologists sometimes have a way of proving what you always suspected was true. A recent study of popular song lyrics done at the State University of New York in Albany shows not only that messages about sexual relationships dominate the songs at the top of the charts, but also that songs about sex sell better than other songs.

Perhaps more surprising were the studyâ??s findings on the gaps between genres. The authors of the study, Dawn R. Hobbs and Gordon G. Gallup Jr., found a large difference between the â??reproductive messagesâ? embedded in country music and those found in pop and R&B. Successful country songs tended to have messages â?? in descending order â?? about long-term commitment to marriage, parenting children, break-ups and oaths of fidelity.

On the other hand, the top three themes in songs on pop charts were, in order, the singerâ??s sex appeal, a personâ??s promiscuity and one-night stands. For R&B songs that made it to the top, the most frequent themes were, in order, the singerâ??s sex appeal, boasts about the singerâ??s wealth as it relates to finding a mate, and descriptions of erotic acts.

In other words, country songwriters tend to write about mature, adult relationships, while pop and R&B songwriters write more about hooking up with someone at the local nightclub.

The authors analyzed 174 songs that made it into the Top 10 in 2009 and found 92 percent of them had one or more themes from a long list of 19 categories of messages related to evolutionary biology, from descriptions of genitalia to keeping tabs on a mate. They also looked at lyrics for Top 10 songs going back in time for 60 years, in 10-year increments.

The nature of pop music has not changed much, the authors said. The number and kinds of messages relating to courtship and finding a mate remained stable in the country and pop genres, but in R&B there was a sharp rise in such messages over the last 20 years, the study found.

In general, hip-hop and R&B songwriters talk more about sex and sexual relationships. The country songs analyzed in 2009 had about 340 references to sexual issues, or about 6 per song, while roughly the same number of top R&B songs had 973 references to those topics, or 17 per song. (Pop songs were in the middle, with 513 reproductive messages, or 9 per song.)

Whatâ??s more, the authors found a direct correlation between the number of references to sex in a song and how well it did on the Billboard charts. The study was published in the most recent issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

(The study: [url]http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP09390416.pdf[/url])