American popular song lyrics have celebrated love since before the turn of the century. In 1892, "After The Ball," a bittersweet ballad of misunderstood love, was published and became the first "million seller"'. The popularity of love lyrics has survived economic depression, war, and wide-ranging critical attack". Although positive love recordings predominate, there have always been "love negative" lyrics which treated the decay and disappearance of affection. Their continued existence suggests that all aspects of intimate relationships are amenable to serious consideration in song. Economic, technological, and social factors serve as broad constraints within which creative capacities, chance, and the tastes of producers and consumers combine to determine what recordings "hit" at any given time. Shifts in stature or popularity of sound recordings have already been shown for genre or song type, mode of performance (i. e., artist type), and market concentration (i. e., distribution of hits among manufacturers). While its evolution has been more stable, lyric content is also subject to fluctuation in mass appeal. The present study is conceived in two parts. The first section examines differential popularity by lyric content between 1940 and 1974 in order to derive historical periods. The second section compares love negative hits with the hits of all other lyric types within different historical periods for song type, artist type, and manufacturer.These analyses will identify the relative contribution of lyric content and epoch to change in record success.