Study finds simple secret to writing a hit song: make it happy
Researchers say people clearly prefer happy music – but there is less and less of it
Hit songs today are “happier”, more danceable and more likely to be sung by women than songs that fail to make it to the charts, a study into 30 years of musical evolution revealed Wednesday.
But also it noted a sombre trend: while people clearly prefer happy music, there is less and less of it.
“More and more unhappy songs are being released each year,” a research team from the University of California Irvine reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
Overall, they found that “happiness” and “brightness” in music has declined, “while ‘sadness’ increased in the last 30 years or so”.
But hit tunes defy the trend, and tend to be “much” happier than unsuccessful ones – think of Pharrell Williams’ Happy.