Why Every Song on TikTok Sounds Like It Was Written by a Marketing Team
Jennifer Gurton- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
Catchy, clippable, and completely devoid of soul? Welcome to the new music economy.
It starts with a hook. Ten seconds long. Usually something vaguely sad or way too confident. It’s delivered over a synthy beat that feels like someone googled “TikTok-core template.” Then comes the drop, if you can even call it that, followed by a chorus designed not to move your soul, but to loop seamlessly under a GRWM video or thirst trap #2749. Sound familiar? Yeah. Every song on TikTok sounds the same right now, and we need to talk about it.
Music by Algorithm, Not by Heart
There was a time when a “hit” song came from sweat, touring, and late nights spent wondering if you were wasting your life chasing melodies. Now? A hit can come from someone testing 14 different hooks in a spreadsheet and picking the one that sounds the most like a sad text message. Art has been replaced with strategy. Emotion replaced with optimization.
Artists are being told by managers, platforms, and even labels: “Write the part that’s gonna go viral first." Forget the bridge. Forget the narrative arc. Forget the second verse entirely. Just give us a hook that works under a 12-second makeup tutorial.
Songs Are Getting Shorter
The average length of a pop song is now under 3 minutes. In some cases, under 2. That’s not an accident. Streaming platforms reward replayability. TikTok demands immediacy. And the almighty algorithm does not care about your artistic process.
You’re not writing for an audience anymore. You’re writing for momentum. And if that momentum doesn’t catch in the first 5 seconds? You're toast. Scroll. Forgotten. Deleted like a bad draft in CapCut.
Is TikTok Making Music Worse?
Let’s be clear: TikTok has changed the game for emerging artists. It’s broken careers wide open. It’s democratized discovery. And some of the best songs of the last five years got their first breath from TikTok.
But here’s the issue: the platform’s dominance has flattened the soundscape. Everyone’s chasing the same aesthetic. The same tempo. The same mood board of emotionally vague lyrics wrapped in just enough synth to make it replayable, but not too much to make it interesting.
And the worst part? It works.
The Artist vs. The Content Machine
Real ones know: the song always came first. The visual? The performance? The fit? That came later. But now, artists are being told to think like content creators first, and musicians second.
Write for the loop. Film for the feed. Be digestible. Be clickable. Be algorithm-friendly. If you’re not all of those things? Good luck.
It’s no longer “what do you want to say?”It’s “what part of this song will someone lip-sync to while crying in a hoodie?”
Look, we’re not here to gatekeep. There’s room for catchy. There’s space for trends. We love a good viral bop as much as the next music junkie. But when every song starts to feel like it came off the same assembly line, something gets lost. The rawness. The weirdness. The parts that weren’t meant for public consumption.
