Sounds like meritocracy to my ears: exploring the link between inequality in popular music and personal culture

ABSTRACT

Extant research documents the impact of meritocratic narratives in news media that justify economic inequality. This paper inductively explores whether popular music is a source of cultural frames about inequality. We construct an original dataset combining user data from Spotify with lyrics from Genius and employ unsupervised computational text analysis to classify the content of the 3,660 most popular songs across 23 European countries. Drawing on Lizardo’s enculturation framework, we analyze lyrics through the lens of public culture and explore their link with individual beliefs as a reflection of personal culture. We find that, in more unequal societies, songs that frame inequalities as a structural issue (lyrics about ‘Struggle’ or omnipresent ‘Risks’) are more popular than those adopting a meritocratic frame (songs we describe as ‘Bragging Rights’ or those telling a ‘Rags to Riches’ tale). Moreover, we find that the presence in public culture of a certain frame is associated with the expression of frame-consistent individual beliefs about inequality. We conclude by reflecting on the promise of automatic text classification for the study of lyrics, the theorized role of popular music in the study of culture, and by proposing venues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• meritocracy
• inequalities
• enculturation
• unsupervised text analysis
• computational methods

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to Stijn Daenekindt, Kate Williams, Kobe de Keere, Giselinde Kuipers, and Julian Schaap for their insightful comments that helped to greatly improve this paper. We also thank the participants of the cultural sociology group at KU Leuven and the LOBOCOP group at Erasmus University for sharing their thoughts on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In order to support future efforts in this direction, we made our data, syntax, and appendix openly available at: https://osf.io/5427t/?view_only=6b6bed04a7794131872802aa9e8783ee.

2 In particular, we measured the presence of the theme of inequality through the closeness to the concept of ‘poverty’. After several iterations with different concepts (e.g., wealth, inequalities, rich) the concept of poverty emerged as the best in classifying songs that actually represent the theme of economic inequality.

3 The results presented in Table 3 remain unchanged when Gini is removed as a control variable (see online Appendix.C).

Additional information

Funding

Jonathan Mijs received funding from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, EU Commission Horizon 2020 Grant no. 882967 and the Nederlandse Wetenschappelijke Organisatie, grant no. VI.Veni.201S.003.

Notes on contributors

Luca Carbone

Luca Carbone is a PhD student at the School for Mass Communication Research at KU Leuven. Luca's work lies at the intersection of cultural sociology and media effect studies. In his research, he investigates the presence and prevalence of narratives about success and social status in media entertainment contents as well as the potential influence that such representations have on individuals' beliefs about inequalities, with a particular focus on adolescents.

Jonathan Mijs

Jonathan Mijs (PhD Harvard University, 2017) is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. His work investigates how people perceive, explain and evaluate social inequality. His research has been published in Social Problems, Socio-Economic Review, and Sociology of Education, among other journals. It has featured in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times.