Corpus Archives

The Songkorpus comprises the following artist and thematic archives. All archives contain XML TEI P5 annotated lyrics with lemmatizations and part-of-speech annotations. Named entities, neologisms, and constituent structures are annotated throughout; some archives also include rhyme type annotations. We sincerely thank all contributing artists for allowing their lyrics to be used for non-commercial scientific research.

Artist Archives

Udo Lindenberg

Lyrics covering more than five decades of one of the most influential German-language rock artists. The founding archive of the Songkorpus.

Konstantin Wecker

Lyrics from a singer-songwriter known for politically engaged and poetically sophisticated German-language music.

Stoppok & Danny Dziuk

Lyrics from one of Germany's most distinctive rock-pop duos, known for ironic wordplay and colloquial language.

Element of Crime

Lyrics from an influential Berlin band, whose literary and melancholic German lyrics are noted for poetic density.

Ulla Meinecke

Lyrics from one of the first prominent female voices in German pop and singer-songwriter music.

Hannes Wader

Lyrics from one of the key representatives of the German folk and political song movement.

Fettes Brot

Lyrics from a Hamburg hip-hop group known for humorous, linguistically playful texts that blend rap with pop elements.

Ohrenfeindt

Lyrics from a Hamburg rock band known for straight-ahead hard rock with German lyrics rooted in everyday life.

Dota

Lyrics from the Berlin singer-songwriter Dota Kehr, known for lyric-driven indie folk with political and social themes.

Thematic Archives

Chart Songs

Monitoring archive of the most commercially successful German-language songs, tracking Top 100 Singles Chart performance alongside genre metadata.

GDR Songs

East German songs, partly based on the GDR chart lists, covering two decades of popular music from the German Democratic Republic.

HipHop Songs

German-language rap lyrics spanning Deutschrap's development from a subculture phenomenon to one of Germany's most successful music genres.

NDW Songs

Lyrics of "Neue Deutsche Welle" — a German music movement that blended punk, new wave, and pop in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Miscellaneous

Other assorted songs spanning six decades of mainstream culture and independent releases.

Archive Timeline

Time span covered by each archive, sorted by start year.

Artist archive Thematic archive
19542025
Chart Songs
1954–2025
Miscellaneous
1964–2026
Hannes Wader
1969–2022
GDR Songs
1970–1990
Udo Lindenberg
1972–2023
Konstantin Wecker
1973–2021
Ulla Meinecke
1977–2002
NDW Songs
1978–1985
Stoppok & Danny Dziuk
1980–2023
Element of Crime
1989–2023
Fettes Brot
1994–2019
Dota
2003–2025
Ohrenfeindt
2003–2024
HipHop Songs
2005–2024

Archive Sizes

Token and text counts per archive, sorted by corpus size. Tokens exclude punctuation.

Archive Texts Tokens Share Size (log scale)
HipHop Songs Thematic 7,172 3,097,106 60.0%
Chart Songs Thematic 2,547 722,753 14.0%
Miscellaneous Thematic 2,956 659,479 12.8%
GDR Songs Thematic 1,000 175,261 3.4%
NDW Songs Thematic 500 78,637 1.5%
Udo Lindenberg Artist 361 75,863 1.5%
Konstantin Wecker Artist 283 74,181 1.4%
Hannes Wader Artist 220 67,582 1.3%
Fettes Brot Artist 147 59,199 1.1%
Stoppok & Danny Dziuk Artist 202 42,746 0.8%
Dota Artist 178 42,610 0.8%
Element of Crime Artist 124 24,823 0.5%
Ohrenfeindt Artist 116 20,308 0.4%
Ulla Meinecke Artist 87 17,843 0.3%

The bar chart uses a logarithmic scale: each equal step on the bar represents a tenfold increase in token count. This compresses the large differences in archive size so that smaller archives remain visible alongside the much larger Hip-Hop archive.

These analyses are based on corpus data as of July 29, 2026.