A couple semesters ago, Peter Weber had a student in his music production class who was really passionate about writing and recording their own lyrics. The student eventually started creating their own unique beats and even went on to produce an original song.
Moments like these made Weber realize just how much talent his students were capable of having as well as how meaningful his job could be.
“Helping kind of guide [my students] through [making music] and watching them run with it, it’s a lot of fun and really rewarding,” Weber said.
Although this process can be extremely fulfilling for people who are pursuing careers in producing music, many artists’ goals today are more centered around chasing hits rather than making art, according to KT Press News Outlet.
The way music becomes popular today is drastically different than how it used to be. Rather than hearing new songs on the radio or buying a record, songs today are frequently circulated through apps like TikTok and Instagram, typically blowing up when popular content creators post to them.
Although new singles that artists release are the ones that usually experience this clout, older songs resurfacing on the app also undergo this traction.
Songs like “Pretty Little Baby” by Connie Francis and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, which came out in 1962 and 1977, respectively, experienced a massive jump in Spotify streams after blowing up on TikTok.
“I am thrilled and overwhelmed at the success of ‘Pretty Little Baby.’ I recorded that song 63 years ago and to know that an entire new generation now knows who I am and [about] my music is thrilling for me,” Francis said in an interview with People Magazine in 2025.
Weber says that a comeback like this can be mainly credited to one thing: The internet.
“Social media has been arguably the biggest defining change in our life with the way it’s affected everything and the impact it’s had on the collective consciousness,” Weber said.
With the growth of TikTok, many newer music artists have begun to utilize the app to boost their music careers. An example of this being Sombr, an indie pop artist who’s currently ranked number 36 in Spotify’s top artists after only having gone viral recently.
Although his music career started in October 2021, Sombr hadn’t experienced much fame until early 2025 when his song “back to friends” went viral on TikTok.
Since then, he’s released an album titled “I Barely Know Her” with songs like “12 to 12” and “undressed” also blowing up on TikTok after being used for breakup-related content. On Feb. 5 he also released a single called “Homewrecker,” which currently has 59 million streams on Spotify.
This “blow up” can be partially credited to him releasing teasers of the song’s music video on TikTok with actor Milo Mannheim and influencer Quenlin Blackwell before it came out.
Weber believes approaches like these to promote their music is what a lot of artists today are expected to do.
“It’s forced artists to become, in their own right, content creators,” Weber said. “Because it’s like, ‘Oh, I gotta make the post, tease the song, drop a little clip of this,’ and then [artists] become a little more aligned with an online media content creator.”
Other ways artists leverage their music careers today is by taking advantage of their already big social media fanbases. Some examples are people like Addison Rae and Alex Warren who originally became famous for their presence on TikTok in 2019 and have since turned to singing and songwriting.
Warren released a song titled “Ordinary” in 2025, which became extremely popular for wedding-themed content on social media and has now surpassed one billion streams on Spotify. After receiving this positive feedback from his 20 million TikTok followers, Warren has continued to put out more music, with his newest single “FEVER DREAM” reaching four million streams only a day after being released.
Rae, on the other hand, did not receive this initial approval. Instead of being praised for shifting her career from influencer to “pop star” after releasing her first song “Obsessed” in 2023, Rae was criticized and even accused of putting out the song as a “cash grab” from people online.
Although she gained more respect for her newer songs “Diet Pepsi” and “Fame is a Gun,” critics online still condemn her music for being monotone and sounding like any other song on TikTok.
Though, it isn’t just Rae’s music that faces this problem. This repetitiveness can be credited to many current artists making music for the sole purpose of chasing trends. While it was more common before social media for artists to make the music they wanted, Weber believes that the listener is who’s shaping the industry today.
Although there will always be artists who stray off and “do their own thing,” many musicians today are starting to create more and more music that sounds similar to what is already popular instead of having an original style.
“[Musicians will say] ‘This gets a lot of clicks, this gets a lot of likes, this gets a lot of attention, let’s create more of that,’” Weber said.
While this has posed some benefits for artists trying to get their music out there, it’s also caused discussion online about whether these songs even deserve their popularity.
“Sometimes the songs are kind of annoying and repetitive,” sophomore Lelia Easter, head of the “Dancing Divas” TikTok account, said.
TikTok accounts like the one Easter runs are primarily made for posting fun dancing videos to trending audios, but Easter has admitted that she sometimes doesn’t even like the songs the girls make videos to.
“[I don’t love] ‘Baby Boo.’ It’s really popular but it definitely isn’t the best song,” Easter said. “Some of the songs that are trending I wouldn’t listen to outside of watching TikTok.”
Repeatedly hearing songs online that someone might not voluntarily listen to is a universal experience according to a survey of 258 Prospect students that said 60.1% of them have had a song ruined for them because of TikTok. This can be partially credited to these songs being considered “unoriginal.”
Rather than coming out with music that’s authentic to the artist, musicians release the same type of songs their audience favors.
“It’s like, ‘Am I going to create something that’s meaningful to me and put it out there and if people like it, it may be something that’s incredibly original?’” Weber said. “‘Or am I going to just replicate something really popular right now and it might be hot for a second, but that doesn’t stand the test of time?’”
Many newer artists face these problems of being mundane because they’re so focused on being approved by society. According to Weber, musicians who are more concentrated on staying current rather than the actual production of their music will still become obsolete eventually.
“With anything in life, [if you’re] chasing relevance, you’re going to come up short, because nobody stays relevant forever,” Weber said. “You might hit a peak of popularity, then at some point, the tide is going to change.”
What many artists don’t realize, though, is that the songs they make to “stay relevant” also die out at some point. In fact, lots of songs artists release that were made specifically to become a trend actually face more criticism than other songs due to their overexposure on the internet, according to The Lamron News Outlet.
Instead of chasing this fame, Weber’s biggest advice to anyone looking to pursue a career in music production is to make music that you love and not to be concerned about going viral.
“It’s hard to tell someone ‘Don’t worry about being popular’ because a lot of musicians want to be popular,” Weber said. “But the true [artists] that go on wholesome careers find it’s really about the feeling they get when they perform. It’s not necessarily what they’re getting back from the audience that’s important but more like ‘This music is important to me and I love performing at a high level.’”
