Music notes surround a phone with the TikTok app open, featuring a checkmark on one side and an X on the other. Critics argued that TikTok has reduced music to bite-sized trends, echoing past concerns over other music trends. The “TikTokification” did not signal the decline of music; instead, it created a space where artists could connect with their audiences in new and innovative ways.
“TikTokification” is an internet term coined to describe the cultural influence of one of the world’s most popular social media platforms. A quick search yields video essayists applying it to everything from wellness culture to Fortnite to law enforcement in Pakistan (almost like a TikTok trend of its own). But its most persistent target is music. According to the argument, TikTok has flattened songs into fifteen-second hooks, incentivized sameness, and just ‘made music worse.’
Persistently, and personally for my entire lifetime, people have complained about music getting worse. The standard rebuttal is nostalgia: everyone thinks the music of their youth was superior. Yet even knowing this, I’ve caught myself thinking things like, ‘Everything kind of sounds the same now’, or ‘The only music I listen to is at least eight years old.’
My fears have been worsened by recent empirical research: From three separate 2024 Scientific Reports studies, researchers found that for popular songs: melodic complexity has declined significantly since the 1950s, lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive, and that there are long-term trends toward timbral homogenization (which after googling, I found means that the variety of the sound of popular music is decreasing).
The temptation, then, is to blame TikTok. But while the platform has visibly shaped how music is made and consumed, it is not the root cause of music’s perceived decline.
TikTok as an accelerator
TikTok has unquestionably changed the incentives of songwriting. On the platform, only a short clip of a song goes viral. This structure rewards tracks with immediate hooks and encourages artists and labels to chase moments of virality rather than cohesive albums.
But this phenomenon of music structures shifting to cater to technology isn’t new. In the early 2000s, the rise of custom ringtones produced a wave of what critics dubbed “ringtone rap”: which were tracks designed around a short, catchy segment that would loop well on a phone. Earlier still, examples like radios favoring three-minute singles, cable channel Music Television (MTV) favoring striking visuals, and jukeboxes favoring songs that grabbed listeners quickly.
The economics beneath the sound
So while it is clear that music is changing from different influences, it isn’t necessarily a root cause of the belief that music as a whole is fundamentally worsening. More structural reasons come into play here, and the answer lies in the economics of streaming and platform-driven culture.
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) Global Music Report 2025, global recorded music revenues reached $29.6 billion in 2024. Streaming revenues alone exceeded $20 billion for the first time, representing about 69% of total recorded music income.
Streaming has reshaped music into a highly measurable numbers game. Revenue favors volume and consistency over risk, and algorithms reward familiarity. Labels hedge against uncertainty, artists are encouraged to build brands rather than bodies of work, and songs become tools for visibility as much as expressions of craft.
This dynamic aligns with a term writer Cory Doctorow coined in his book of the same name, “enshittification.” The term describes the process in which a new technology or industry is initially motivated to cater to the user as much as possible, but once it gains a large enough user base, it gets steadily worse with more features like ads and delays to support the profit-making purpose. I argue that with music, the nature of music seeming to ‘worsen’ is an outcome of enshittification. Money has always shaped music. Yet economics alone do not explain why this shift feels like a cultural loss.
The evolution of presentational music
Music has been a symbol of wealth and power for many historically powerful classes. According to Exploring the Arts, during the renaissance, court music became a formalized medium for royalty to display wealth, with skilled musicians performing at banquets, processions, and coronations. By the 16th century, playing and appreciating music was considered essential to aristocratic life, as noted in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier.
And in smaller towns and villages in Europe and the world, music was a communal practice. A popular (and romanticized, thank you Tangled) example of this was European village dance, where residents in rural towns would gather in the village square to dance to music often provided by fellow villagers. In early America, fiddles, flutes, and other portable instruments provided music for jigs, reels, and country dances.
By the 19th century, according to the Library of Congress Blogs, printed sheet music and music halls expanded access, and brought performance out of elite spaces and into public ones. Technology only improved this availability of presentational, skilled music, and slowly created a shift away from the more communal, town square, collective music-making culture. Music became more of something to behold and appreciate, and not something to partake in and create.
In his 2008 book, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, Thomas Turino describes participatory and presentational music, differentiated by whether the listeners are active participants in music-making. He argues that music and dance are central to forming and sustaining social groups, by allowing people to feel part of a community through shared cultural knowledge and synchronous performance.
To see this difference in western culture of music, we can compare it to a modern music genre that still keeps large aspects of its communal foundation: amapiano. Amapiano is a South African music genre that didn’t come from a single genre so much as a shared township ecosystem, involving sounds like kwaito, deep house, jazz, and bacardi house. Authorship in amapiano is intentionally blurry, and the song is not the message; it is a container for interaction. DJs are the creators, but the crowd response determines longevity, and extended mixes matter more than chart records.
Despite global attention and TikTok exposure, amapiano has resisted full flattening. Even the viral tracks are still slow, groove-based, and anti-rush compared to Western pop. Locally, the genre still belongs to taxis, house parties, and shebeens. The TikTok version might be flattened, but the local version remains alive and structurally resistant.
What remains at home
The United States is not devoid of communal music cultures. Country music still thrives in small venues and bar circuits, and alternative scenes continue to form around local shows and online communities. These spaces matter not because they produce “better” music, but because they preserve music as a social practice rather than a purely consumable product. They enable innovation and personal connections to the genre.
The best example of the difference between participatory and presentational music within a genre is seen in American hip hop and rap. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the genre was born in the 1970s in the Bronx, emerging from block parties, street battles, and local DJ culture. Much like amapiano, MCs and DJs developed their craft in front of live audiences, with feedback, competition, and community energy shaping the music. As hip hop grew in popularity, it quickly moved into commercial spaces and like western pop more broadly, the focus moved from community to consumption.
Hip hop’s assimilation into mainstream pop illustrates commodification at work, and raises questions about cultural appropriation that merit deeper consideration. However, as an example, the genre shows the core tension of western commodification and why music feels like its getting worse.
TikTok didn’t ruin music, it made visible the endpoint of a long transformation. The real loss is not of quality, but of participation. When music becomes a product to consume rather than a practice to live, it loses its social heartbeat, and that is what shapes our sense of cultural decline.