By some metrics, we’re in a declining age of love songs. Of the 5,100 Billboard Top 10 hits from 1958 to 2023, 1,040 of them could be called “serenades,” or songs about love and devotion sung from one person to another. These are indeed in decline, going from 23 percent of hits in the 1960s and up to 27 percent in the 1990s to a sharp drop to 12 percent of hits in our current era. It’s less that love songs overall are in decline, but rather that they’re changing in nature. A similar decline is seen in songs about heartache (15 percent of hits today, down from 22 percent in the ’60s and 20 percent in the ’90s), but songs about other, more ambiguous kinds of love — complicated love, sexually confident songs, love songs about the self, songs about pursuit — have gone from 18 percent of hits in the ’60s to 42 percent of hits today. By that metric, once you consider the whole ecosystem, the rate of love songs is flat.
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