After a hard day, all I want is to watch some funny Reels and distract myself from the day’s stress. To my dismay, my nightly doomscroll is interrupted by whichever dreaded 10-second clip of robotic hit-maker production that happens to be trending that day. Different creators, the same song. Maybe it was funny or interesting the first time, but after a hundred reels in a row, it gets old.
Most of us are quick to dismiss short-form video trends as silly or irrelevant. But, it turns out that these TikTok trends, which we often call harmless, are actually having a measurable impact on the music industry beyond social media.
Generally, most TikTok videos are around 15 seconds long. Recent research from the University of Sydney has discovered that “the catchiest bits of a song, like the chorus or beat drop” are most likely to go viral. In my experience, when I listen to the rest of a viral song, it tends to be pretty bad—other than that 15-second viral soundbite.
In a post-Covid music industry, it’s not just the trend that’s being molded to the attention span of its audience, but the song itself. Notably, songs that go viral on social media have an explosive increase in Spotify and Apple Music streams. In some cases, record labels are even hiring influencers to make their songs more likely to go viral.
Ole Oberman, Global Head of Music for TikTok and ByteDance, argues that TikTok has helped music become more global and creates increased opportunity for smaller artists. While Oberman argues that globalized music has more benefits than drawbacks, there is also cause for concern over the homogeneity of this “TikTok pop.”
In one notable example, Noah Kahan was credited on STELLA LEFTY’s viral song “Boston” due to its melodic similarity to Stick Season (which also went viral in 2020 and led to Kahan’s explosive success). An article from Holler explained that “the fast-emerging artist and her crew [decided] to give Kahan a writing credit before ‘Boston’ came out, in order to stop any potential risk of legal action.”
When discussing this choice, Lefty said, “I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good.” But is it really “whatever, all good”?
“Boston” is just another example of what we already know: the commercial success of TikTok music has created an aversion to creativity in pop music. To put it simply, weird songs don’t go viral. So, when artists and record labels are using virality as a measure of success, they are less likely to take creative risks – both lyrically and musically.
This hesitancy to take creative risks in commercial music is not new. In a 1985 interview, Freddie Mercury said about “the radios didn’t really like [“Bohemian Rhapsody”] initially because it was too long and the record companies said you can’t market it that way.” To everyone’s surprise, “it became a major hit,” spending nine consecutive weeks on the UK Singles Chart and arguably became the most popular song of Queen’s entire discography.
The success of “Bohemian Rhapsody” would be unfathomable in a TikTok-obsessed music scene that shuns musical complexity at all costs. Although unique music is still being created, it is being stifled by a soulless algorithm whose goal is momentary popularity, not enduring influence. I doubt that many people will remember in 20 years which songs went viral.
The shortening of our collective musical attention span makes it necessary, now more than ever, to create weird music. Music, like all art, is an expression of our shared humanity. I would argue that, to accurately reflect the human experience, music must be complex and weird and at times difficult to digest.
And, despite the algorithm’s attempts to create uniformity, I still have hope for the music industry. Humans are too weird to stop making weird music.
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