Commercial Influences in the Lyrics of Popular American Music of the Postwar Era

Abstract

This study is the third in a program of research consisting of content analyses of commercial influences in popular cultural products. The first two studies, which looked at the texts of bestselling novels and the scripts of long‐running Broadway plays, found dramatic increases in brand‐name usage over the course of the postwar period. These results were also found in the third study, which examined the lyrics of the top American song hits of each year for the 1946–1980 period. The consistency of the findings suggests the presence of a new phenomenon which we have called “word‐of‐author advertising.” The implications of this phenomenon for consumer policies, especially those relating to education and product information programs, are drawn and discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.