Since the very first tribal cultures, music has played an instrumental role in fusing like-minded people into movements – creating monocultures that share an emotional connection with key songs and genres.
Punk’s peak of 1977. Rave culture and acid house between 1988 and 1994. Even the Brat Summer of 2024 (though arguably Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter was the official Song of Summer 2024).
Musical movements have been a barometer of public sentiment and a shared collective consciousness for decades. And within those musical movements, we often identify a song of the summer.
A bop or anthem that, regardless of your musical genre of choice, is popular with the masses and acts as a soundtrack to the cultural happenings of the year. But 2025 might be seen as the first year in recent memory that doesn’t have a standout song of the summer.
Glynn and bear it
If you’re thinking: “But Ben, the Jet2 advert is the song of summer” then I’d argue that pretty much sums up how algorithmic social media has started to create a dissolving of monocultures.
For a start, Jess Glynn hasn’t headlined any summer festivals this year. If her song truly was the song of summer, then surely she’d be on every festival bill? Secondly, the ubiquity of the Jet2 advert came about from a TikTok trend with fairly negative connotations – it was used to showcase really terrible holiday moments.
Maybe that’s why, despite Hold My Hand being the pseudo-song of summer, Jet2 posted target-missing financial results this year. What we’re seeing is the fact that TikTok and the growth of hyper-personalised social consumption have resulted in culture splintering into thousands of bespoke “Song of the Summer” moments. What I suspect we might see in the coming years is a complete shift away from music having the power to be a great unifier (I personally wouldn’t compare even the Swiftie movement to Beatlemania). Music will become spread across a huge range of smaller communities online.
Or will it?
TikTok ’n’ roll
I’m thinking about the resurgence of country music. Or, as I like to call it, The Countrification of Pop. AKA Cowboy Carter. AKA Post Malone. AKA Shaboozey. And, yes, AKA Taylor Swift. I don’t want to offend any country music fans here. But this sentence in a 2024 Poetics paper got me thinking: “Music and politics have been interconnected for centuries, and it is difficult to explain a political event without mentioning the subsequent music creation.
Examples include anti-war music during the Korean and Vietnam Wars [and] a shift to country music with patriotic undertones after 9/11.” (Kay, 2017). What if music still does have the power, culturally, to bring us all together? But what if that movement isn’t a liberal “stick it to the man” movement akin to Beatlemania or punk? What if it just so happens that the musical movement of the moment is a tad more conservative?
That culture at large is coalescing around music, and that music is country music – a genre which, in the US at least, goes hand in hand with many conservative values. But wait… Country music has a deep history in African-American culture, and the release of Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road in 2018 could have actually sown the seeds of a crossover between country music and hip-hop, which in itself might be seen as a reclamation movement.
Old Town Road exploded on TikTok. The platform helped to catapult the song to fame, and also generated the Yeehaw Agenda – a movement that helped Lil Nas X reframe who gets to look and sound country.
TikTok effectively helped to squash the conservative, legacy gatekeepers of country music in Nashville, supercharging a long-overdue correction of Black country aesthetics and artists. So while we might not have a Song of the Summer, the power of algorithmic social is a double-edged sword.
Monocultures are gone. They required a few mass broadcasters, such as Top of the Pops and synchronised public moments.
TikTok has atomised distribution and created billions of networked micro-cultures that are arguably far stronger and spread far faster.
