TikTok has ruined the music industry and modern music.
Through constant algorithmic promotion, a quick 15-second clip of a song or a designated “trending sound” is forcefully pushed to the masses, radically changing how music is made and consumed by millions of people every single day.
Because of this constant algorithmic push and the drive for instant virality, this environment puts immense pressure on modern artists to conform, leading to a noticeable and frustrating lack of artistic depth. Songs are built around instant virality now and that’s exactly what major record labels hope for.
Short 10-second snippets can boost a song straight to the charts, while platforms like
Spotify only pay out royalties if listeners stay for longer than 30 seconds. This forces creators to fit the exact mold of the apps where their music is shared, losing some of their core creativity for a potential trending sound.
Because creators are forced to chase that mold and prioritize short attention spans, the traditional structure of a song is changing as a direct consequence. Artists now place the catchy hook right at the beginning to grab short attention spans, dropping fundamental elements like long instrumental introductions, bridges, and second verses in favour of loop-friendly, repetitive formats.
This shift even impacts formal education: students at places like Berklee are being taught to write “mini songs” before composing full-length tracks. Instead of building a story, music is now engineered to catch our attention in a millisecond.
Ultimately, this cycle of engineered, bite-sized hits reshapes listeners’ expectations
and paves the way for deeper digital shifts.
When most people discover new music through quick clips and never bother to listen to the full song, it warps what audiences look for in a track, driving a flood of formulaic, mass-produced audio made strictly for online trends rather than meaningful listening experiences.
This digital shift and its training of audiences have helped accelerate the rapid growth of artificial intelligence in the industry. TikTok has become a primary launchpad for AI tracks, making it easy for computer- generated music to go viral just like a real person’s hard work. Because the app trains people to digest sound in quick chunks, blind and uncritical listeners easily accept robot audio.
Thousands of songs are generated every day, stealing profits from real artists by using bots to stream fake tracks — such as the AI bot IngaRose, whose song was used on TikTok over 300,000 times — normalising a world where synthetic audio takes off just as easily as genuine human effort.
Put it all together and you get a total shift in music culture, a decline in creativity and originality. With AI on the rise in the industry as a product of this environment, focus your attention on real creative minds on the platform, not the robots.
It’s interesting to see how music will continue to develop, but let’s not forget: we’ve lost our originality, and TikTok is to blame.
Eve Linden is a second-year Political Studies and Psychology Student and The Journal’s Assistant Photo Editor.
Tags
Music, Music Industry, TikTok, Tiktok trends
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