Let’s Have Some New Clichés

German Schlager music has often been criticized as an inferior product of the culture industry. The genre’s distinctly conservative and narrow-minded image contrasts with its broad audience in one of the world’s largest music markets. In this study, a content analysis of 548 songs from 2009 to 2019 was performed to investigate topics and trends in Schlager music with regard to social diversity. Songs referring to love outnumbered all other categories, accounting for 75.36%. References to traditional values such as Classical family patterns, Eternal love and fidelity appeared in 26.09% of songs. Sexist clichés and gender stereotypes about girls and women were found in 14.6% and 11.86% of the songs, respectively, far exceeding those about boys and men. Non-heterosexual relationships were described in only two songs (0.36%). While some of the assumptions made about the genre in existing non-empirical literature could be verified, some findings reported in this paper suggest an increasing range of song topics and more social diversity among artists

Content analysis · Fidelity · Musical · Popular music · Intellectual Property Law