The cultural value of art is not only in how it preserves a moment through its expression of that time, but how it moves time forward, pushing an audience to experience the world in a new way. Music is an essential piece of this; what we listen to today is the score of the time that we live in. When I think about what our generation will think when we listen back to the music of our youth, I wonder what story those songs will tell. Will it be of a period where artists explored genre-bending methods of creation, countering the boundaries of the status quo to liberate the masses? Or will the repetition of the same top 10 most popular songs mindlessly reverberate through the archives of TikTok clips? As much as music is a cultural instrument that can affect deep change both within an individual or society, it would be naive to assume that power and money do not drive the music industry, which can be exemplified in the TikTok-ification of popular music over the last five years. Given all that is at stake in our cultural legacy, is the popularization of music through mediums like TikTok doing more harm than good? 

The most popular songs when we grew up were the ones we heard on the radio as we drove to school or playing in the grocery store. My first memories of music are listening to CDs in my family’s living room, dancing to the music my parents had collected in their twenties and thirties and rolling the windows down of our minivan as Maroon 5 played softly in the background. Today, ten-second clips of the most popular songs repeat over and over in an endless loop through a viral dance or in the background of a cooking video. The soundtrack of today is not determined by its cultural influence or ingenuity, but by how many views it has gained on a single app. The implications of this are significant – not only because it reflects a broader shift in our society towards primarily online forms of consumption, but we have encased a significant portion of our cultural time capsule in a media source that changes too quickly for the impact of music to be digested. 

However, to see the silver lining in this, TikTok trends do empower new and rising artists on their way to the top. Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ and Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Driver’s License’ were both immediately transformed from a brand-new song into a sing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs hit in a matter of days through their accompaniments to videos and dancing on the app itself. Both artists now hold Grammys in multiple categories since they catapulted to fame. Ice Spice, Noah Kahan, and Pink Pantheress are other examples of popular artists who got an initial push in their success with the help of their online virality. Viral music of this nature allows us to be transported back in time – Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ (1985), popularized through its inclusion in the popular show, Stranger Things, went viral for its nostalgia-inducing melody in the summer of 2021. In the ending scene of the one of the most popular films of 2023, Saltburn, ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ by Sophie Ellis-Bextor transported us to an early 2000s glitter-filled disco, also immediately going viral, to be hummed along to in coffee shops across the world. One of the amazing things about our access to the internet is our ability to discover new things every day, expanding our palettes and participating in something with a global community. There is nothing inherently wrong with going viral and finding a large audience, but within that process, has a framework emerged in the industry to cater to what is expected to be popular rather than what is original? 

As producers witness the ways that these artists earn millions of streams overnight through the virality of their music, it can only be assumed that at least some would then start to make music with the objective to go viral. Of course, this is not the case for every artist, and those that do rise to fame through TikTok can be completely unique and captivating artists, but it is equally important to recognize the harm imposed when the musical environment becomes saturated with unoriginal beats, dissociative lyrics, or generally boring music purely for the sake of going viral and ultimately making money. As more songs are produced with the sole intent of virality-induced profit, the music of our generation is cheapened. By prioritizing views over impact, those corners of the music industry forsake the very thing that makes music, and art at large, a cultural pillar of human society: the creation of what did not exist before.  

On the other hand, I wonder if artists feel, to keep up with the rapid cycle of relevance that TikTok creates, that their identity as a creative requires them to be dynamic and experimental. In this case, the churning cycle of what’s relevant and desired could play a part in influencing mega-star artists such as Beyonce, who is in the process of  making a country album; maybe Fred Again is making songs with Lil Yachty and Baby Keem because without thinking outside the box, his music would blend into the hundred thousand other videos with an EDM song playing over it. 

There are pros and cons to everything that exists in our tech saturated world, and the relationship between music and TikTok is no different. Without it, I would not have discovered some of my favorite songs, and I find myself frustrated by the fact that there are so many artists that deserve a huge audience but will never have it because fourteen-year-olds wouldn’t want to dance at their phone to their songs. Maybe the fate of our cultural influence isn’t at stake, or maybe TikTok changes everything in terms of what future generations will see when they think about the ‘early 21st century’. Either way, it’s clear that from the music we listen to, to the art we look at and the clothes we wear, the digital generation is living up to its name, even in the cultural realm. And yet, whether you think it’s inspiring or depressing, our ability to create, share and enjoy music together is one of the distinct features of being human, and therefore it will always matter.