A quarter of TikTok’s 1.6 billion users are teenagers. TikTok’s meteoric spike in downloads in 2020 made it become the most downloaded app of that year, and since then its audience has only grown.
With TikTok’s quick rise to the mainstream in American pop culture, it is evident that its influence on music is inescapable. Even with a large portion of the app’s content being short comedy skits, music is still being spread. Damien Dutton, ‘25, despite using TikTok “more for comedic entertainment than anything else,” noted that he has found several songs directly through TikTok, and Dutton isn’t the only one. Daniel Lebben, ‘26, said that when he uses TikTok, even though he primarily uses it for videos about cars and motorcycles, he still cannot escape music playing in the background of everything.
Lebben noticed something interesting about the songs he had discovered—he thought songs were getting shorter. He said “popular songs used to be like five minutes long. Songs nowadays are a minute, two minutes, maybe three.” When asked if he could guess an average song length in 2024, he estimated at around two minutes and thirty seconds. Lebben wasn’t far off. According to the Washington Post, since the 1990s, song lengths have been decreasing. The 90s sported an average length of 4:19, while 2024’s average clocks in at just over three minutes. Why may this be happening?
One common suspect is Spotify, as Spotify incentivizes streaming songs multiple times. Its end of the year recap, “Spotify Wrapped,” shows users how often they streamed specific songs and artists, and where they rank among other Spotify listeners. As “Wrapped” has grown in popularity on social media, users are encouraged to stream songs as much as possible to rank higher among other users. With shorter songs, it’s faster for users to stream these songs multiple times. However TikTok, a primarily music-based app, can often be where these shorter songs gain the most traction, where only a snippet of the song can be used. This leads to small portions of songs going viral, generating traffic. Because of the potential of those short snippets, artists are encouraged to make songs just for those little moments. Lebben said “those little moments are the only reason people are listening sometimes.”
In all fairness, 1.6 billion users is a lot of people. And when you have that many people who just want to hear the short catchy song, then that is what music will be pushed. And that necessarily isn’t bad either, it’s just different. TikTok allows artists who don’t have millions of dollars for marketing to blow up from those little moments, opening the door for artists in the modern age.
