Hey Jude, do song titles show up later than they used to?

Because my dad knew most of them from just a few notes, I learned to be quick to identify these songs. But I also noticed that a lot of the songs seemed to sing the title just seconds into the lyrics, at which point the game was over and we'd change channels to go again.

I still play this game whenever I'm listening to the radio, by myself or with friends, and noticed that today I seem to have a bit more time before the title is sung. Which made me think, are song titles showing up later in song lyrics than they used to?

Yes.

The chart below shows the number of words you have to sing before getting to that song's title on average for every year since 1955. I had a hunch the general trend would be more words over time, but even I wasn't expecting such a dramatic shift. 

 (Press Play!)

In the 1950s and 60s, most songs got to the title within ~20 words. In four of those years, the average song sang the title within the first 10 words, hitting a low of just 4 words in 1961.

The 1950s Billboard chart was dominated by Elvis with chart toppers like 

• Hound Dog ("You ain't nothin' but a hound dog")

• Love Me Tender ("Love me tender, love me sweet")

• Blue Suede Shoes ("Well, it's one for the money, two for the show three to get ready, now go, cat, go but don't you step on my blue suede shoes")

And of course, The Beatles provided the soundtrack for the 1960s, with 24 Billboard Top 100 songs, including 

• I Want to Hold Your Hand ("Oh, yeah, I'll tell you something I think you'll understand when I'll say that something I wanna hold your hand")

• Eleanor Rigby ("Ah, look at all the lonely people! Ah, look at all the lonely people! Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been")

• Strawberry Fields ("Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields")

Well that explains some of this early trend. Of the 10 artists with the most Billboard 100 songs of all-time, Elvis and The Beatles have the lowest average title placement, and it's not close. 

Rihanna is next, but she says nearly 2x as many words on average before her titles than The Beatles. Taylor Swift's titles are nearly 6x later than The Beatles! (more on this later)

But this is about more than just a few artists. I included 676 unique singers and bands in this analysis, and it is clear the older artists sang the title earlier than today's artists.

8 of the 10 artists with the earliest title placement had their first Billboard 100 song prior to 1971 (*NSYNC and Brandy of the 1990s being the exceptions), while most later-title artists had their biggest hits post-2010 (excluding George Michael and LL Cool J, also in the in-between decade of the '90s).

The early 1970s were a turning point for songwriting and title placement. Some of this is related to the evolution of song structure, as Chris Dalla Riva has written about. Prior to 1970, most songs followed the 32-bar song form, sometimes denoted the AABA song form. As the name suggests, these songs usually have two sections, often denoted “A” and “B”. The song’s title is usually found in a refrain, or short-repeated line, at the beginning or end of the A section, thus earlier in the lyrics. In the 1950s, 1 in 4 songs I looked at started with the lyrics. These days that number is less than 1 in 20.

The verse-chorus form is different in that the title usually appears later in the song, namely in the chorus. The percent of Billboard #1 hits with a chorus spiked from 40% in the late-1960s to 70% in the early-70s. The trend in title placement continued as well: 1969 saw a big jump to 33 words before the title appeared in the lyrics. From there, the title began to drift deeper into the lyrics, and finally leveled out at around 50 words by 1990.

What about songs where the title isn't sung at all? Think “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” by Billy Joel. Traditionally, these made up just 5 to 10% of popular songs. That percentage dropped to less than 5% from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. 

The trend has reversed, as it's become more popular to name a song after something other than a lyric. Artists making music typically characterized as contemporary R&B or rap have driven most of this trend. Jay-Z doesn't sing the title on nearly half of the songs I looked at, including "Empire State of Mind", "Otis", and "The Story of OJ". Artists like Doja Cat, The Weeknd, Drake, Chris Brown, and Usher often avoid it as well.

The title is the quickest way fans can identify songs, so this naming trend may indicate artists’ increased trust in their fans' ability to identify and find their music even if the fans don't hear the title while listening. Finding good music has certainly become easier in the last few decades with streaming, Shazam and other listening tools, and the closer connections artists can have with their fans on social media.

This could explain why, even after the verse-chorus form had been fully established, the title continued moving back. After a long plateau at around 50 words the average number of lyrics before the title appears has started ticking up again since the mid-aughts. It passed 60 words in 2010 and hit an all-time high of 71 in 2024. This trend is particularly interesting when you contrast it with the “TikTok-ification,” which has resulted in shorter recordings. 

Artists might want to catch people’s attention quickly, but it’s clear that the song title isn’t required to do that.

Here is the complete set of 4,134 songs I analyzed. Feel free to play around and see how your favorite artist writes.

The Beatles vs Taylor Swift

Let’s compare two of the most popular artists across time, namely The Beatles and Taylor Swift, to understand this trend a bit more. Each has over 200 unique songs, and they clearly exhibit the evolution from the 1960s to today: The Beatles take just 13 words to reach the title on average; Swift takes 75. 

Plus they are my Dad's and girlfriend's favorite artists respectively, so I kind of had to do this deep dive into all of their songs.

The Beatles wrote 52 songs that started with the title (e.g., "Yesterday", "Help!", "Hey Jude"). That's over 20% of songs in their catalog. Only 9 of Taylor's (<4%) start with the title (“Untouchable”, “Today Was a Fairytale”, “When Emma Falls in Love”, “Don’t Blame Me”, “Gorgeous”, “I Think He Knows”, “betty”, “Dear Reader”, “So Long London”).

Who's writing these lyrics? 

Taylor Swift has written all of her 232 songs, though some are cowritten with the likes of Jack Antonoff (~25% of her songs), Aaron Dessner (20%), and Max Martin (10%). The Beatles songs are pretty evenly split between Paul McCartney and John Lennon with a few by George (13%), Ringo (3%), and others as well.

On Swift's songs, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner seem to like getting to the title earlier than the pop star, while Max Martin hides the title farther back. But all of them are still 4x later than any Beatles writer. 

Among the Fab Four Paul puts the title latest at 16 words into the song, while Ringo gets right to it at an average of just 3 words!

Let's close out with one final example showing that song titles are now later in lyrics than before, and that the radio name game is getting more lenient. 

In the 472 combined Beatles and Taylor Swift songs from their main discographies, they have 1 name in common. Can you guess it?

The Beatles version of "Tell Me Why" from A Hard Day's Night starts with the title. In Taylor's version from Fearless, it takes 112 words for her to ask why. 

A Quick Note on Methodology

...for those reading too closely.

I assembled my database of 4,134 songs from Genius, the same site Spotify uses to source lyrics. The songs and lyrics were pulled on May 7, 2024. Rather than pull songs based on title (which can vary widely with "feats" and such), I pulled [X] songs for each of 676 artists with 3+ songs on the end of year Billboard 100 list from 1955 to 2024, with [X] determined by the actual number of songs that artist had on the Billboard lists. As a result I don't have exactly the Billboard 100 songs, and I do have some covers, but it still gives a close approximation and a good view on the most popular songs each year. Using Billboard's Yearly Hot 100 for each year tells a similar story:

The number of songs by year is a bit variable, and ends up over-indexed to the mid-2010s, but we still have 10+ songs to analyze for every year, and 50+ for most years.

In terms of genre, Pop is the most popular (as expected) in the database, followed by Rock and R&B. Note that a song can be tagged with more than one genre. Again we have a good representation from a number of genres and sub-genres reflecting what people have actually listened to over the years.

Unless otherwise specified, "average" title position is taken to mean the median, in order to remove outliers that would otherwise skew the data (looking at you Eminem).

In most cases it is fairly straightforward to determine if a title appears in the lyrics or not. The word "yesterday" appears in the song "Yesterday" by the Beatles. The words "scenes from an Italian restaurant" do not appear in the Billy Joel song of that name. 

However, there are cases where judgement calls had to be made:

• If the difference between title and lyrics is punctuation (e.g., "help" in the Beatles' "Help!"), slight spelling (e.g., "I got a feelin'" in The Black Eyed Peas' "I've Gotta Feeling"), letters/numbers as shorthand (e.g., "I'm a slave for you" in Britney Spears' "I'm a Slave 4 U"), or spacing (e.g., "coldhearted" in Paula  Abdul's "Cold Hearted"), I've counted it as a match.

• If the title has a "Part" in it, I require the lyrics to say "part". e.g., "Airplanes Pt. 2" by B.o.B. is not counted as a match. There were ~20 instances of "Parts".

• If the title is an abbreviation (e.g., "OMG" by Usher) I do not count the spelled out version as a match. There were ~10 instances of abbreviations.

• A different tense is not counted as a match (e.g. Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer" only says "paralyzed" so is not a match).  

• Any addition or subtraction of a word (no matter how small) that makes the title different from the lyrics is not counted as a match.