Why do love songs dominate the market?

   My students from a general-education class conducted a project about love-song lyrics in Hong Kong. They collected some data and found that love songs have been dominating the pop-song market although the dominance declined somehow in recent years.

   Why do love songs dominate the market? Some reasons are found by my students. One reason is related to the working practice of producers of songs (including lyrics writers, commercial music producers, distributors, etc). They discovered that a general practice in the industry is to copy all major elements in a successful song into another. Several love songs are identified as containing very similar love contents. For example, if telling a story receives good response from audiences, the lyrics writer will also tell a story in the next song. I replied by saying that mechanical repetition will only multiply a dominant pattern in songs. If it is love songs that originally dominate the market, then this dominance will become more apparent with such a repetition practice. The question is: why love songs dominate the market from the very beginning?

   My students are good and of course they have offered an independent explanation of why love songs dominate the market. They say: Love, or more precisely romantic love between people, is a basic human sentiment. It also easily affects people’s emotion. That’s why love songs become a dominant form of pop songs.

   I certainly have no objections to the importance of love in human life. And love is emotionally affective. But I still have some suspicions. Pop songs’ counterparts in ancient worlds, such as poetry in Tang Dynasty and Lyrics in Song Dynasty, feature a lot of expressions regarding loves. But love is NOT a dominating theme. Politics, poor people’s livelihood, wars etc are also equally, if not more, important themes. We may say romantic love was undermined in the ancient time because of the traditional dogma against it. If this is an explanation, I am not completely convinced especially for the Tang Dynasty that is famous for its liberal cultural atmosphere. I suspect there was a dogma against romantic love at that time. That said, I admit traditional dogma against romantic love may have some influence in other periods of the ancient time.

   But I still have suspicions. In the modern world, these dogmas against romantic love are no longer effective. But my impression is that romantic loves are not a dominating human sentiment or emotion in a person’s WHOLE life. This is not to say love does not dominate our life in a particular period of life. When we are young, love dominates our emotions. Upon reflection and by observation, this is true. Young people concentrate more on romantic love than older people. This can also be explained from a biological point of view: evolutionarily youth is the most suitable period in life for reproduction and so emotions in our young time should be directed by evolution to searching mates, or in other words, to romantic love relationship.
   However, after this period, love is not that important, at least not equally important. Older people are not so easily moved by love songs. The older we are the more we are concerned with other emotions. I recently heard a sentimental sentence made by a 60-year-old man from a radio programme: He said, for a long time, he has not cried until recently he can’t avoid crying when thinking of his mother, who in her whole life was always ready to sacrifice anything for him. I do not have a good survey. But I guess it is by and large right that the emotions of people, male or female, when approaching or after middle age, usually will not be dominated by romantic love. Especially after they have had their children, their loves for children dominate their emotions. So, if different age-groups are dominated by different types of emotions and youngsters do not account for a majority share in our population structure, why love songs dominate the market?

   Therefore, if emotions explain why love songs dominate (as my students suggested), we have to explain why the pop-songs market is dominated by youngsters, but not other age groups. It seems that youngsters do really dominate the pop-songs market. Since mainly youngsters purchase (or download) pop-songs, sellers will cater for their taste (a high concern for love).
   But this explanation is not complete yet. We still need to know why young people dominate the pop-song market (and they seemingly also dominate many other entertainment products’ markets). I do not have a good answer for this yet. There may be a number of reasons. Probably mature people who spent most of their time in works or housekeeping have less time to listen to songs and for shopping. Probably older people's marginal utility of a song diminishes less rapidly due to their less effective sense system (they won’t easily get bored by listening to a single song) and so they purchase fewer new songs. Probably young people are more willing to spend because most (but not all) of them are not income-earners but receive money mainly from parents. Thus, they tend to consume more.
   We can keep on thinking of different reasons and may try to test their validity. Anyway, whatever these reasons would be, I hope my advice can stimulate my students to think things behind and don’t just stop at their simple explanation: Why love songs dominate the market? Answer: This is because love is important in human life. I think explanation like this is fine but not enough.