Why are song lyrics easier to memorize compared to other texts?
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Your brain likes patterns, and is better at recognising and remembering patterns than it is with regular texts.
Song lyrics are just elaborate patterns. Even if you only readily remember half the lyrics, the patterns help your brain remember the rest.
Songs have a pattern. There’s a rhythm and sound to it, maybe a rhyme scheme. So if you remember a bit of a song, that helps you to remember the rest of it.
When it’s just text, there’s nothing much to clue you in about what the next line might be.
It’s the same reason why a list of words with no context is harder to memorise than a specific text. If I remember the line “All happy families are alike” then there’s only so many things that could logically follow that. If I pick 20 random words out of the dictionary then that’s way harder to remember because remembering one doesn’t help to remember the others.
As others have mentioned it’s because of the rhythms and patterns. You can memorize things by putting a tune to them like how nursery rhymes are used to teach young children.
People also listen to songs repeatedly and in most cases the lyrics repeat or have some pattern of similarity and are relatively short as well.
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