By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026In an age of music recommendation algorithms, hit songs are changing; today's songs use a smaller vocabulary of unique words and repeat those words more often: 46/ 1475
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026> Vocabulary richness, distinct words relative to length, has fallen by more than a quarter since the early 1960s, while the share of repeated lines has climbed by nearly a third. The modern hit says less and says it more often, because the hook that works gets repeated. 47/ 1556
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026But that's not the whole story! While each song resembles *itself* more ("saying less more often"), within that constraint, there's far *more* variety today than before: a given song's (constrained) vocabulary has grown *more* distinct when compared to all the other songs' vocabularies. 48/ 1360
