Towards an LLM-based method for quantifying the sexual content in song lyrics

arXiv:2608.08885 · physics.soc-ph, cs.CL, cs.SD · Submitted 2026-08-09 · Read on arXiv

Ignacio M. Sticco

physics.soc-ph, cs.CL, cs.SD

Submitted: 2026-08-09

Updated: 2026-08-11

Comments: 17 pages, 10 figures. Code, scoring prompt, and corpus: https://github.com/ignaciosticco/open-lyrics-scorer

Code: https://github.com/ignaciosticco/open-lyrics-scorer

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Reggaeton is one of the most widely consumed music genres in the world, and its lyrics are commonly regarded as highly sexualized.

Terminology

Abstract

Reggaeton is one of the most widely consumed music genres in the world, and its lyrics are commonly regarded as highly sexualized. This claim rests mostly on qualitative studies and on small-scale quantitative ones. This paper has two goals. First, we present a reproducible method that uses a large language model to quantify thematic content in song lyrics along several independent dimensions. The method is not restricted to sexual content. Second, we apply it to a corpus of 1,259 songs by 12 reggaeton artists released between 2002 and 2025. The analysis covers four topics: a dataset characterization, a per-artist comparison, an analysis of how the dimensions change over time, and a comparison between our sexual-explicitness score and Spotify's own explicit flag. We release the data collection code, the scoring prompt, and the corpus, so that other researchers can replicate the approach or apply it to their own lyrics datasets.

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