Source: Krystine I Batcho There is no mystery to feeling sad when you are faced with disappointment, loss, or stressful situations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the US Census Bureau began sending weekly questionnaires to over a million households and found that feeling down, depressed, or hopeless was experienced more often, especially among young adults. During the post-pandemic recovery period from June 2023 through March 2024, such adverse feelings became less frequent, but had not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Most people feel down from time to time, but persistent feelings of intense sadness that affect the quality of a person’s life and well-being can be associated with depression. The trend toward increasing numbers of people experiencing sadness and depression had begun before the pandemic, with rates of depression increasing since 2015 and reaching their highest levels in 2023. It is not clear why many people have been feeling sad more often, even when they aren’t experiencing adversity.
Many aspects of contemporary life are candidates for contributing to feeling sad more often. Many people report feeling lonely and anxious about financial, work, and relationship stress. One especially powerful impact on emotion is music. Recent studies of the tone and lyrical content of popular music have found that songs have gotten sadder over the past 30 years. One study of 500,000 songs released in the United Kingdom from 1985 through 2015 found a decrease in songs with a happy mood and an increase in songs with a sad mood. Another study of American popular music analyzed 1,010 Top 40 songs on Billboard’s “Hot 100” charts from 1965 to 2009. Billboard hits represent the preferences and habits of listeners and the likely frequency of exposure to songs in popular culture. The authors found that songs became longer in duration and were characterized by an increase in the use of minor mode and a decrease in average tempo, consistent with the observation that popular music became more sad-sounding over several decades.
Findings such as these are representative of an empirical consensus on a musical emotional trend toward negative tone and content. In 2018, a quantitative analysis of the sentiments expressed in 6,150 songs of the Billboard Hot 100 covering the years from 1951 through 2016, showed that lyrics of popular music have moved toward a more negative tone. Sadness, anger, disgust, and fear have increased significantly, while joy, confidence, and openness have decreased. Such findings highlight important questions about the role of music to express popular sentiments and the influence of music on well-being. Is music sadder because people are sadder? Or is sad music helping make people sadder? Or are we becoming trapped in a cycle of sadness inspiring sad music and sad music inducing greater sadness, and so on?
It is clear that music has a powerful emotional impact on listeners across age and gender. Research on the influence of music on emotion has revealed mixed findings that may reflect inherent conflict within musical dynamics or contradictory effects that depend upon interactive cognitive-emotional processes. Perhaps paradoxically, research confirms that sad music is typically pleasurable. Many people enjoy listening to sad music even though (or because) it makes them sad. Research revealing benefits of music-evoked sadness has indicated that sadness is induced as the listener identifies empathically with the lyrics. The same study found that nostalgia, not sadness, was the emotion most often elicited by sad music, with memory being the main vehicle by which sadness is evoked. A review of research findings has suggested that music-evoked nostalgia fosters social connectedness, elevates self-esteem, strengthens self-continuity, and enhances meaning in life.
And yet, sad music evokes sadness. Is it possible that the trend toward increasingly sad popular music contributes to the spread of sadness, especially among young adults? Can it be that the pleasure of listening to sad music is supporting self-indulgence in sadness associated with greater loneliness spawned by increasing time spent in virtual, rather than face-to-face reality? Empathizing with lyrics of a sad song can offer solace and a pensive refuge in times of loss or trouble. But in times of greater face-to-face social life, such sad reverie is often interrupted by the demands and elevated mood of interacting with others. Traditionally, happy music often accompanied joyous social occasions, at times with dancing and eating in mood-uplifting gatherings. By contrast, sad music is typically experienced in solitude. It is not surprising, then, that in our time of prevalent loneliness, sad music has gained in popularity.
Is sad music exacerbating the spread and deepening of sadness? In the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns, many venues for public social activities have not yet been restored. The pandemic might well have accelerated a normalization of reliance on virtual reality, as advances in technology have provided the means. The American Psychiatric Association has reported that early in 2024, 30% of adults experienced loneliness at least once a week, with 30% of those aged 18-34 reporting they were lonely every day or several times a week. The impact of music occurs within a social-cultural context. Music can be a social or a solitary experience. Enhancing opportunities for social connectedness in the contemporary milieu may help popular music regain its emotional diversity and balance. When people return to dancing and celebrating, they will welcome the happy music that energizes such meaningful parts of life.
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