In recent years, there has been a scholarly debate regarding the decrease in automobile-related mobility indicators (car ownership, driving license holding, VMT, etc.). Broadly speaking, two theories have been put forward to explain this trend: (1) economic factors whose impacts are well-understood in principle, but whose occurrence among young adults as a demographic sub-group had been overlooked, and (2) less well-understood shifts in cultural mores, values and sentiment towards the automobile. This second theory is devilishly difficult to study, due primarily to limitations in standard data resources such as the National Household Travel Survey and international peer datasets. In this study we first compiled a database of lyrics to popular music songs from 1956 to 2015 (defined by inclusion in the annual “top 40”), and subsequently identified references to automobiles within this corpus. We then evaluated whether there is support for theory #2 above within popular music, by looking at changes from the 1950s to the 2010s. We demonstrate that the frequency of references to automobility tended for many years to increase over time, however there has more recently been a decline after the late 2000s (decade). In terms of the sentiment of popular music lyrics that reference automobiles, our results are mixed as to whether the references are becoming increasingly positive or negative (machine analysis suggests increasing negativity, while human analysis did not find a significant association), however a consistent observation is that sentiment of automobile references have over time become more positive relative to sentiment of song lyrics overall. We also show that sentiment towards automobile references differs systematically by genre, e.g. automobile references within ‘Rock’ lyrics are in general more negative than similar references to cars in other music genres). The data generated on this project have been archived and made available open access for use by future researchers; details are in the full paper.

近年来，关于汽车相关移动性指标（汽车拥有量、驾驶执照持有量、VMT 等）的下降一直存在学术争论。从广义上讲，已经提出了两种理论来解释这一趋势：（1）其影响在原则上得到充分理解，但其在作为人口亚群的年轻人中的发生被忽视的经济因素，以及（2）不太清楚- 了解汽车的文化习俗、价值观和情感的转变。第二个理论非常难以研究，主要是由于国家家庭旅行调查和国际同行数据集等标准数据资源的限制。在这项研究中，我们首先编制了一个 1956 年至 2015 年流行音乐歌曲歌词数据库（定义为列入年度“前 40 名”），并随后在该语料库中确定了对汽车的引用。然后，我们通过观察从 1950 年代到 2010 年代的变化，评估了流行音乐中是否存在对上述理论 2 的支持。我们证明，多年来，提及汽车的频率往往会随着时间的推移而增加，但最近在 2000 年代后期（十年）之后有所下降。就引用汽车的流行音乐歌词的情绪而言，我们的结果是混合的，关于这些引用是变得越来越积极还是消极（机器分析表明消极性增加，而人类分析没有发现显着的关联），但一致的观察是汽车参考的情绪随着时间的推移相对于歌词的整体情绪变得更加积极。我们还表明，对汽车参考的情绪因流派而系统地不同，例如，“摇滚”歌词中的汽车参考通常比其他音乐类型中对汽车的类似参考更负面）。该项目产生的数据已存档，可供未来研究人员使用；详细信息在全文中。