Music analysis: Why the ‘song of the summer’ does not really exist anymore
I miss when the song of the summer was obvious. Not in a deep, dramatic way. Just in the sense that everyone knew what it was, writes Music News Blitz’s Fatima Aziz.
You would walk into a shop and hear it. Get in someone’s car and hear it. Go on holiday and hear it. Sit in a restaurant, scroll through Instagram, watch TV, just exist in public, and there it was again.
Songs like ‘Despacito,’ ‘Call Me Maybe,’ ‘One Dance,’ and ‘Umbrella’ were everywhere.
Even if you hated them, you still knew every word by August.
Now, the idea of one official summer anthem feels a bit impossible.
TikTok has made everything more chaotic
The biggest reason is TikTok.
A song does not need months of radio play to become huge anymore. It just needs the right ten seconds.
Sometimes it is not even the chorus. It might be one random lyric, a sped-up version, a transition sound, a dance, or a tiny clip people use for holiday videos and outfit checks.
That means a song can feel absolutely massive, but only in a very specific online bubble.
Your For You Page might be pushing one track every five videos, while someone else has genuinely never heard it.
One person’s summer song is a country track. Someone else’s is a K-pop comeback. Someone else’s is a random remix they do not even know the name of, because they only recognise the sound from TikTok.
So when people argue over the song of the summer now, they are not always talking about the same summer. They are talking about whatever version of summer the algorithm has built for them.
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Everyone has their own soundtrack
Music feels more global than ever, but also more personal than ever.
TikTok can make a Spanish-language song, an Afrobeats track, a pop chorus, a country hook, or a World Cup anthem sit next to each other on the same feed.
That is exciting. It means people are discovering music outside the usual radio-friendly box.
But it also means we do not really have one shared soundtrack anymore.
We have lots of tiny soundtracks. The song your friends are obsessed with. The one people use for edits. The one attached to a niche meme. The one you keep hearing while getting ready. The one that makes you think of one very specific week in June.
That can actually be quite sweet. A summer song doesn’t have to belong to everyone to matter.
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Do we miss everyone knowing the same song?
Still, there was something fun about one song being truly unavoidable.
Part of the magic of ‘Despacito’ was that it felt like the whole world had accidentally agreed on the same soundtrack, and you couldn’t escape it.
Now, songs go viral quickly, disappear quickly, come back as remixes, get turned into memes, and then get replaced by another sound two weeks later. Everything moves so fast that even a huge song can feel temporary.
Maybe the song of the summer has not died. Maybe it has just split into a hundred different versions.
We are not all listening in the same places anymore. We are listening through TikTok, streaming algorithms, fan edits, playlists and whatever the internet decides to throw at us that day.
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