Music with explicit lyrics is on the decline in Spotify’s biggest charts, according to a new report.
As reported in new analysis from pop culture data journalist Daniel Parris here, the share of explicit songs on Spotify’s Top 50 chart has fallen sharply in recent years.
The data indicates that only 13 per cent of Spotify’s Top 50 songs in 2026 so far carry the ‘explicit’ tag, down from 74 per cent in 2018.
Parris has argued that the trend appears to be driven by two major factors: listeners increasingly returning to older, more radio-friendly songs, and hip-hop no longer dominating Spotify’s biggest charts in the same way it did in the late 2010s.
The analysis pointed to the renewed popularity of classic tracks such as Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, both of which have continued to find new audiences on streaming platforms.
It also noted that hip-hop, which has historically accounted for a large share of explicit charting songs, is no longer as dominant on Spotify’s Top 50 as it was during its commercial peak last decade.
The explicit music tag dates back to the mid-1980s, partly the result of the Parents Music Resource Center campaign led by Tipper Gore. By the early 1990s, the music industry had agreed to label explicit material with the now-familiar “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” warning.
In the streaming era, that label has become a metadata tag applied to songs and albums across platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.
The report suggested that, nearly 40 years after the label was introduced, the mainstream may have become more “sanitised” — not because of censorship, but because of changing listening habits and the changing balance of genres on the charts.
Elsewhere, Spotify has removed more than 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd’s ‘Earrings’ after artificial streaming was found following allegations linked to betting activity on prediction market Kalshi.
Spotify have said that “all streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation”, adding that it has “best-in-class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams”.
The rise of AI and streaming manipulation on music streaming services continues to be a major hot topic, including fake artists appearing on platforms and songs being removed from charts over AI concerns.
Earlier this year, Apple Music also introduced transparency tags to let users know if they are listening to music that was made using AI.
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