By Jeffrey Cohen | Sports Writer
One trend that has grown over the past six years is “TikTok music” — music created for the chance to gain popularity on the social media platform. These songs tend to be centered around short, catchy hooks and predictable rhythms, making them catchy for TikToks.
Ultimately, the world of music has resorted to samples and striving for clicks on social media.
This trend of purposely predictable and catchy tunes leads to a significant issue: blandness. Because the music is designed to emphasize only a short snippet to become popular, the rest of the songs fall flat and end up feeling fairly repetitive.
Doja Cat’s 2023 hit song “Paint The Town Red” grew partially due to its advertising and popularity on TikTok because of its catchy hook and danceability. The song currently boasts almost two million posts on the platform.
The idea of creating music mainly for commercial reasons or popularity results in something that lacks care and creativity. If these artists and bands try to fit into a mold, there is no room left to make something memorable or unique — which is what’s happening currently.
On the other end of the spectrum, rap has been entrenched with the use of samples. It seems that many rap songs rely on past music and certain clips from those songs to create the identity for what is being made. This is called sampling or interpolation.
The trend of using samples originated in early hip-hop with groups like A Tribe Called Quest and eventually became significantly more popular with Kanye West. At that point, sampling was not the norm, but an innovation that reworked previous pieces. Sampling wasn’t used as a way to mass-produce music; it was an art form in itself rather than a crutch.
As time has passed, sampling has become more of a constant in the rap world. Rappers are being more reliant on the utilization of others’ work, so that their brand and identity are based on their use of samples. Differences between artists are being measured more by what genre of music they sample rather than their own talent or ability.
For both sections of today’s music scene, pop and rap, there is a need for innovation and creativity. Artists across multiple genres are recycling and regurgitating other music.
The past century of music revolved around creating something new and unique. Each artist and band had their identity in what they made and differentiated themselves from others in their respective genres. Now with the focus on going viral and being successful in an algorithm, we have lost that essence of music.
While these trends have not reached every mainstream creator, they continue to dominate the industry, rewarding cookie-cutter beats and constant sampling rather than fostering an identity through one’s own creativity. It’s time for music to return to its original form and for artists to stop creating for the TikTok algorithm.
