Song Lyrics Average 3rd Grade Level

There's a reason you can mindlessly sing along to those popular hits on the radio, and it's not just because they're played constantly.

According to SeatSmart.com, Entertainment and ticket data blogger Andrew Powell-Morse analyzed the lyrics of 225 songs that spent three or more weeks at the #1 spot on the Billboard charts across several genres.

All he did was enter each song's lyrics into a computer program that determines a piece of text's Readability Score. The test revealed chart-toppers in 2005 had lyrics that fell between a third and fourth grade reading level, while in 2014 the songs averaged between a second and third grade reading level.

In other words: lyrics of popular music are getting dumber. Among genres, country music had the highest reading level (3.3), followed by pop (2.9), rock 'n' roll (2.9) and R&B/hip-hop (2.6).