Many of the world's classic songs are all about "you" — consider Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You", The Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and Elton John's "Your Song."
According to a new study just published in Psychological Science, there's a good reason why "you" feature so much in song lyrics. Researchers Grant Packard and Jonah Berger show that the popularity of songs is correlated with the amount of "you" in the lyrics.
Packard and Berger first examined the lyrics of 1,736 English-language songs that made it to the Billboard Top 50 downloads chart from 2014-2016. They found that higher ranking songs tended to contain a higher density of "you" or related words ("yours," "yourself"). This was true even after controlling for the genre, the artist and the topic of the song.
What's more, popularity was most strongly predicted by use of "you" as the object of a ...
