Researchers who wanted to understand why certain songs resonate with so many people turned to three and a half decades of chart data and an AI tool to find out. What they found is that the most popular songs consistently reflect the same basic psychological needs that motivate human behavior.
According to research published in Psychology of Music and reported by Phys.org, a team of researchers analyzed the top 10 songs from the Australian Recording Industry Association charts each year from 1988 to 2023, a total of 360 unique songs. They combined content analysis with a custom AI tool called MuseAI to identify recurring themes tied to three psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Those three needs come from work by psychologist Richard Ryan and the late Edward Deci, who argued that humans are broadly motivated by wanting to feel in control of their choices, confident in their abilities, and connected to others.
Relatedness, the desire to feel connected to other people, was by far the most common theme in the songs studied. It appeared in 73% of the chart-topping tracks across the 35-year period. Songs with relatedness themes included Dua Lipa's "Levitating" ("I got you, moonlight, you're my starlight") and John Legend's "All of Me" ("'Cause all of me loves all of you").
The researchers also tracked whether lyrics expressed needs being met or needs being frustrated. Songs where needs were satisfied, such as getting together with a romantic partner, appeared more often, at 47%, than songs dealing with frustrated needs, such as heartbreak, which appeared in 25% of the songs.
Themes of autonomy, the sense of personal freedom and self-direction, showed up in about 15.6% of the songs. The researchers pointed to Miley Cyrus' "Flowers" as an example, with the lyric "I can take myself dancing and I can hold on my own hand." Competence themes appeared in 11.4% of the songs, with Lizzo's "About Damn Time" cited as a representative track, specifically the lyric "I'm not the girl I was or used to be, b*#ch, I might be better."
The research team also noted that the balance of themes likely differs by genre. Early findings from follow-up work suggest that hip-hop lyrics include more frequent competence themes, though those results are still preliminary.
The broader context for the study is a growing body of research linking music listening to mental health and well-being. People use music in at least seven different ways to regulate their emotions, the researchers noted, ranging from entertainment and comfort to working through grief or frustration. The new findings suggest that chart success may be partly tied to how well a song addresses psychological needs that listeners may not even be consciously aware of.
