Written by Madeline Minks

Art by Justin Bissonette

Like most people on this planet, I have a special relationship with music. Somewhere deep in the crevices of my brain are forgotten church hymns and songs learned for Chinese school. The soundtrack of my childhood–a mix of classic rock, eighties pop, and Kesha–never fails to evoke a potent nostalgia. The artists I listened to throughout my teenage years helped me through the turbulence of growing up. Now, music serves many purposes in my life, including setting the mood for whatever I’m writing. I’m listening to music as I write this. Maybe you’re listening to music as you read it. No matter the genre, purpose, or method of listening, chances are that you have an important relationship with music.

When I fall in love with a song, I’m known to go off the rails a little bit. I’ll tell half the people I encounter about it. I’ll send my close friends my favorite lyrics typed out in all caps. Sometimes, the music I’m listening to in the morning even influences how I dress. I doubt I’m unique in this experience; maybe you don’t spam your contacts with Hozier lyrics four times a week, but maybe you can relate to the need to absorb a great song directly into your bloodstream. No? Anyways. Moving on.

There are a plethora of ways to discover new music–the radio, recommendations from friends, Spotify’s Discover Weekly, etc. When I downloaded TikTok in late 2019 to see what all the fuss was about, I realized it was yet another way to discover music. People were making up dance choreography and roller blade routines to a variety of artists I’d never heard of, and it became not a social media platform to me, but a music discovery platform. It was also fascinating to me to observe what sort of songs went viral on TikTok, and which ones weren’t as viral but were showing up on my For You page anyways.

I think it was 2021 when I first discovered that people didn’t share my positive outlook on music gaining popularity on TikTok. I was curious if someone had compiled a playlist of “TikTok songs,” certain that there’d be several and that I would be able to compare the songs people were saving. I found myself facing a different dilemma: dozens of playlists with titles like “songs TikTok ruined” and “TikTok ruined these songs.” I was annoyed but not at all surprised; most of all, I was fascinated. As someone who gets excited about music, I found it hard to understand why someone would spend their energy getting upset about a song gaining popularity.

We’ve all experienced the haters. The I-like-country-Taylor-better people, the I-like-pre-breakup-Fall-Out-Boy-better people, the all-pop-music-sucks people. They’re always there. I remember being so excited when Fall Out Boy released their album MANIA in 2018, only to feel embarrassed by my excitement when nearly every Fall Out Boy fan I knew went out of their way to say how much they hated it. The few times I mentioned that I liked it, the response was always an incredulous, “You like that?” 

Surely, I figured, this was a teenage thing. The majority of TikTok’s audience seems to be in their teens or early adulthood. The haters would grow out of it eventually, and we could all have civil discussions about the music we enjoyed. And to humanity’s credit, if you look up “TikTok songs” on Spotify right now, you get more neutral or positive-leaning playlists than angry ones. Still, “TikTok ruined these songs” has continued to be a phrase that I’ve heard online and in real life. 

In theory, it seems odd that people would want to actively diss something popular. It’s human nature to try and conform to the majority, right? We all do it in different ways, whether it’s adopting our friends’ speech patterns or agreeing with someone’s opinions before we take the time to form our own. And yet, so much of our culture is built on defying the norm. Look at the art world, for example. The Realism art movement developed as a critical response to Romanticism, and Impressionism developed as a critical response to Realism.

In order to theorize why we distance ourselves from the norm, we first need to understand why we might embrace it. Normative social influence, or normative influence, is the scientific term for the need to conform in order to be accepted by a larger group. Our caretakers, peers, teachers, and other people in our lives shape how we act and think. It makes sense, right? “We want to be accepted by our peers; otherwise we risk social expulsion, which, in the past could equal death by lions but today could mean something equally as bad: people making fun of your music taste. 

But if normative influence suggests that we conform to the “majority” (and what that majority is will vary depending on a variety of factors), then why do some people go out of their way to dismiss or even talk down on what’s popular? While there are likely several factors involved, one important aspect is social pressure. Our peer groups in particular help us form our sense of social identity and influence how we treat others. Adolescents are particularly sensitive to this, seeing as they’re just starting to understand themselves and their place in the world. We’ve all likely experienced this type of social pressure at some point; a peer voices their distaste for something, calling it boring or overhyped or any other negative descriptor, and we feel pressure to agree, even if we don’t.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking something is boring or overhyped. I have many things that I think are overhyped that I’ll refrain from listing here and making myself sound like a massive hypocrite. What’s interesting–and sometimes frustrating–is when distaste for a piece of media spirals into a group effort, and the internet is a hotspot for this. A study by scientists in Beijing shows that anger spreads more prolifically on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, than joy, which is a surprise to no one who has ever opened a browser tab. Whether they’re doing it intentionally or not–and I’d put my bet on the latter–people who post about how they don’t like Noah Kahan or boygenius are, theoretically, creating better internet fodder than those expressing their love.

Obviously, saying that anger spreads further online than any other emotion is a huge generalization, but it gives us a possible framework to explain why people shame popular music. I’d also like to take this moment to gracefully acknowledge that most people do not jump on popular music, and that many people express legitimate criticism for popular music, and that even if it’s not criticism and just distaste, people are entitled to their own opinions. I do think it’s worth examining why we jump on the hate wagon.

I think normative influence actually explains this perfectly. While it may feel like the majority of music enjoyers like Taylor Swift’s music, there are plenty of people who don’t like it. And while there are many, many reasons people don’t like Taylor Swift’s music (some being valid criticisms of her marketing and character, some being unfair and often sexist in nature), I’m more interested here in the ones who hate her music because it’s popular. Those who say it’s overplayed and overhyped. While it can be hard to avoid a global phenomenon like Taylor Swift, there’s a lot you can do to mitigate your Taylor Swift listening time. Asking your driver to switch the radio station, for example, or skipping a song that came up on your streaming platform of choice. You can handle the few songs that play at the club or the school function. So why get up in arms about it?

The people who dislike something are as much a group as the people who like it. They may not have the same number of accounts posting lyrics written in cursive and compiled concert clips, but they’re unified under a shared interest. It may not be the majority, but there is still a large group of people who dislike it. One could argue that the dislike could also be considered normative as well.

When I was in second grade, I remember taking a playground oath with a few other girls. This was soon after Justin Bieber’s “Baby” had come out, and everyone at school either professed their love for the song or hated it with every fiber of their being. Me and some other kids fell into the latter group, and we all huddled in a circle and took an oath to always hate Justin Bieber and all of his music. 

It’s hard to judge eight year old me too harshly, especially when you couldn’t go a day without hearing JB at least three times. But the same logic fell apart when Frozen came out in 2013. I adored Frozen when I first saw it in theaters, and I still think it’s a genuinely good movie. But it can be hard to separate a piece of media from the buzz that surrounded it, both positive and negative. The positive buzz was a lot of marketing on Disney’s part; in the decade following its release, Frozen has made $5.3 billion dollars in ticket sales and merchandise, according to IndieWire. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who had a young child or worked in childcare in late 2013 and early 2014, but I also struggled to understand why my classmates kept bringing up how much they hated Frozen. If they hated it so much, why even talk about it in the first place?

I struggle with the same question when I look at these playlists of “songs TikTok ruined.” If the songs are “ruined” for you, why gather them all in one place? Why listen to them at all? Are people hating without thinking, or are they aware of what they’re doing?

I’ve also noticed that many of the songs that have become popular on TikTok were released well before the app gained popularity. “Strawberry Blonde” by Mitski was released in 2013 but gained popularity on TikTok in 2020 when “cottagecore” went viral. “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson is even older, released in 1981; it went viral on TikTok in 2023, over forty years after its release. Considering how the music industry has become heavily digitized and how hard it can be to gain a presence in the industry, it’s great for these artists’ success if their songs go viral online. 

Take the band Mother Mother, for example, whose 2008 song “Hayloft” went viral on TikTok at the beginning of the 2020s and inspired the band to write a sequel, “Hayloft II,” released in late 2021. Singer Ryan Guldemond cited Mother Mother’s fans as invaluable to the first song’s success and its sequel’s creation in a documentary about Hayloft and Hayloft II, saying, “What’s nice about the modern day is that a band can jump online and directly communicate with their audience and seek council.”

If an artist grows in popularity, they can continue to make music. They can sign with a record label if they haven’t already, go on tour, and, most importantly, continue to make music. If a song goes viral, that’s going to benefit the artist–which can benefit the fans as well. There’s often a concern that an artist’s music will get worse or, god forbid, become more mainstream if they gain popularity. In reality, popularity is one of many factors that can change an artist’s music. Band members joining or leaving, switching record labels, life experiences, the state of the world, fans’ reception, and even just the passage of time can have a large impact on the music that artists produce. And if an artist you like changes, that’s okay. You’ll always have their old music, and you’ll have countless other artists to explore. Besides, maybe their new music will grant the same joy to a new fan that their old music does for you.

Artists will always have fans, and they will always have haters, and they will always have fans-turned-haters. It’s like this with every form of art in the world. I think your role in that spectrum comes down to whether or not you exit your teenage years and choose to continue looking down on popular media or choose not to linger on it. There are plenty of things I don’t like, or once enjoyed but have since grown out of. If I’m really that annoyed by a piece of media, I’ll go rant to my friends about how the themes don’t make sense or they did that one character dirty. But publicly, I recognize that what I dislike might bring someone else as much happiness as the things I love bring me. 

So, by all means, be a hater if you want to be. Just remember that TikTok didn’t ruin that song–you’re letting it.