[seunosewa]

The article doesn't answer the question it set out to answer. The poster, being a (fellow) programmer, was (probably) more focused on working out how to scrape the data than on figuring out how to determine the intelligence of a song's lyrics reliably. The methods he came up with don't answer the original question at all.

[justaman]

Its been proven that repeating short phrases results in a catchier tune. The impact marketing has made on music is terrible to say the least. In recent years especially it has become more about what sells that what has emotional resonance.

Has pop music been getting stupider? Was it ever intelligent? Probably not. I think the issue is pop music is more common now than ever as only handfuls of artists can afford a solid marketing budget.

[ghaff]

There are a whole variety of readability tests [1] and many of them consider some of the variables such as word length that he did. Mind you, readability is not the same thing as intelligence. Especially in pop music, I wouldn't expect to see a lot of "SAT words." I'm not sure how you can really measure intelligence of song lyrics but, that said, some sort of complexity metric is probably a reasonable proxy to consider.

[1] http://www.ideosity.com/ourblog/post/ideosphere-blog/2010/01...