It starts with a flicker on the second monitor. A TikTok analytics dashboard, pulsing like a nightclub light. The music editor at a once-iconic magazine rubs her eyes. She’s supposed to be finalising a 2,000-word profile of an up-and-coming singer, but the trend graphs won’t stop twitching.
Trending at the top: a 15-second slice of the very single she’s profiling, except the viral version is sped-up, helium-bright, uploaded by a teenager with a cat avatar. Three days earlier, she was blocking out a cover shoot. Now the hook is surging without her, without the editorial calendar, without even the original tempo. She remembers a spring when a major magazine lined up an exclusive, only to watch @soundhoney post 11 seconds of the chorus over a cat video on TikTok.
By Thursday, the label had rerouted the marketing spend. The editor minimises her draft and stares at the dashboard as if it were an EKG. The patient isn’t dying. The pulse just moved to a different body.
Somewhere else, a 19-year-old presses replay on her own nine-second TikTok. Her face does the work: eyes widen, shoulders jolt, the text crashes in: “this drop melts bone”. She gets 200k likes overnight. A label rep slides into her DMs to say she moved 50k streams in a day. No arc, no context, no star rating. Yet the function is unmistakable. That nine seconds on TikTok is a review, a recommendation, a commission, a shove into the charts. The old cathedral of criticism built a door, a vestibule, an altar. She kicked open a side window, and the congregation on TikTok and Instagram followed the noise.
Where a 3k-word profile used to simmer through the culture for weeks, viral velocity demands ignition now and obsolescence by teatime. In 2025, the 15-second hook crowns hits. The effect is visible in the chart trail left by TikTok: songs break there first, then arrive at Billboard breathless, already famous.
Think of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, a classic you’d think would be revived by a heritage feature or deluxe reissue. Instead, it’s given new life on TikTok and the socials by a man longboarding to work, sipping cranberry juice, the chorus looping like a sunbeam. Critics had praised the song for decades, but one low-budget, unpretentious clip on TikTok detonated decades of affectionate memory into measurable streams.
The old guard, like me—I started on an Olivetti typewriter—can feel the floor vibrating. A veteran writer tells me crafting a long album essay now feels like “practising calligraphy in a motorway lay-by. The work still matters, sure, beauty has its dignity, but the traffic is louder and faster.”
Meanwhile, music critic Anthony Fantano uploads a 20-minute autopsy of a record, rich with history and inference, and a teenager hurls an eight-second verdict into the feed that shoves the same track up the algorithmic ladder. The Fantano TikTok video is still open in one browser tab, paused at an argument about the bridge, yet the teenager’s face is looping in the app, eyes rolling at a weak snare.
The editor is toggling between all of it and a Slack ping from a publicist offering “exclusive” access that won’t mean very much by Friday. The take-making is simultaneous, layered, and noisy, like harmony and feedback occupying the same bar.
TikTok’s Stratifies Attention and Sound
Call it democratisation or call it chaos. Both are true. One consequence is compression. When the hook has to grab by the eighth second, songs get rearranged around the moment that clips best. Writers now talk openly about the “TikTok moment” inside a track, the way producers once talked about radio edits.
Labels push official sped-up versions before some bedroom editor does it first. The medium shapes the music. Marshall McLuhan is grimly right: the format eats the form. A ballad engineered to flourish at 1.25x the original composition’s cousin on three cans of Red Bull.
Walter Benjamin worried that mechanical reproduction would strip art of its aura. The aura today has a different problem: stratification. A song exists in overlapping duplicates: I’m thinking studio master, sped-up edit, meme clip, fan mashup, and, sure, each has its own audience, each shorn of part of the original’s atmosphere.
This multiplication breeds a swarm that outnumbers any single, authoritative account of what the song is. Remember the AI track that mimicked Drake and The Weeknd? It wasn’t good in the conventional sense, but the spectacle gave it a social life before lawyers contacted TikTok to close the taps. The conversation outpaced critique because the medium itself was the headline. Authenticity became a toggle you don’t always see lit. The reproduction travelled so fast that it became the point.
If the argument stopped there, it would be a funeral. It isn’t. Depth still happens, and not just in paywalled print. A longform video essay can excavate lineage and influence with the kind of curiosity Lester Bangs would recognise, and it lands with kids who would never buy a magazine.
A Substack-length meditation on a producer’s drum choices can drift through a week and still change how a niche audience hears bass. The teenager’s nine-second gush on TikTok isn’t fraudulent either. There’s honesty in a face scrunching at a filthy drop. That immediacy punctures the pieties of faux objectivity. No one needs a sermon about “authentic connection” when the proof is right there in a goofy micro-gesture.
Compression, however, takes prisoners. Context thins. The hook eclipses the verse, and the chorus becomes the only gospel anyone learns. The risks multiply for music that breathes slowly, that withholds its sweetness, that requires surrender. The album that blooms on the fifth listen doesn’t trend. The deep cut gets no dance challenge.
A listener who wants more than sugar has to step off the moving walkway and stroll against the algorithmic current. That’s where criticism still carries weight. I guess it’s now like a field guide showing where the night-blooming flowers grow and what they smell like when no phone is recording.
Publicists know this tectonic map by heart. They still send press releases and hire creators to seed a sound into the collective bloodstream. The job has shifted from pitching narratives to making moments. Sometimes, they are outright manufactured. We’ve reached the point where even chart-toppers complain their labels won’t release a single until it fakes a viral jolt. That says a lot about who sets the tempo, right?
The result is an industry that treats attention like surge pricing. If the clip catches, spend. If it doesn’t, pivot, splice, speed it up. The algorithm doesn’t care whether the beat came from a bedroom or a million-dollar studio. It cares about retention over 12 seconds. Critics, meanwhile, are left arguing about timbre while the market rearranges reality around watch-time graphs.
For Music Theory to Survive It Must “Torch” TikTok
None of this means abandoning rigour. It means applying it where the culture actually lives. Benjamin helps when thinking through the aura’s dilution, and McLuhan explains why a chorus feels different at 1.25x. The trick is not to turn music theory into décor. Bring it to the scene like a torch, not a trophy. If a sped-up version of a soul ballad is the one that finally pays the artist’s rent, that fact belongs in the paragraph alongside your close reading of the original tempo’s phrasing. The economy is now part of the aesthetics.
So what has criticism lost and gained in the compression? Lost: the presumption that a handful of publications can set the terms. Lost: space for the middle register of response, the essay that isn’t ecstatic or contemptuous but patient and alive.
Gained: a teeming, global choir where a Ghanaian producer’s breakdown of rhythm sits next to a Glaswegian teen’s skit, and both alter how a song circulates. Gained: speed that can rescue a forgotten groove from a dusty corner of history and shoot it into a delivery driver’s earbuds tuned to a TikTok feed by lunchtime.
Does this discourse still sound like an editorial page? Sounds to me often like a nightclub at capacity, where arguments spill into the smoking area and someone’s recording all of it on their phone.
There’s a private hour where the contrasts feel sharpest. The magazine editor stays late, finishing a review she knows will rack up 10k reads at best. She writes because the record deserves sentences that breathe. I get that. She writes because someone needs to map the references and name the ache.
Meanwhile, the song is already living a second life: half a billion TikTok loops under a hashtag that riffs on a misheard lyric from the bridge. The artist checks both worlds with a kind of delighted dread. In one, a careful review admires the harmonic feint in the final chorus. In the other, that same chorus is a joke that never gets old. She scrolls, then puts the phone down and plays the track at its original speed, as if to remind herself what her own heartbeat sounds like.
Which version is real? The serious opus or the TikTok goofy snippet? Both. The song now exists as parallel phenomena that barely touch: the long listen and the loop. Critics will keep chasing it across those worlds, sometimes late, sometimes early, sometimes drowned out by a punchline.
I’m not sure we need to choose. The point is to hear how the hook mutates as it passes through the feed and back into the room where someone sits with headphones and time.
Picture that room. A chorus leaks under the door. In the corridor, a rush of short clips rises and fades like there’s a party three floors down. Inside, a pair of hands rest on a keyboard, reaching for language that can keep pace with a culture playing everything at once, at double speed. The track keeps going. The cursor blinks.
Out in the corridor, another nine seconds just went viral. In the room, the hook lands, unsped, and hangs for a beat longer than the feed would allow. The silence after it feels new.