Have you ever realised how social media shapes our lives? What we watch, listen, eat and even think is influenced by the content we consume, especially when we talk about culture. While offering connection and identification, giving this false idea of freedom to choose what we engage with, the internet silently places us in shared bubbles with the same curated media as millions of users. Even though people have different tastes, many contents are tailored to various audiences, capitalizing on the nuances of each niche to foster a shared engagement among a big variety of consumers.
When we talk about music, it’s no different: regardless of the multiplicity of genres out there, certain songs tend to become popular. When digging a little deeper, the pattern points to trends that lead to the popularization of the same 15 seconds of a specific song — whether because of a tuneful melody or some catchy lyrics. Either way, social media has been shaping our musical tastes since the beginning.
80’s old soul stays ‘Forever Young’ through TikTok
TikTok is probably the most famous among the younger generations, such as Gen Z and Gen Alpha: musical by nature, TikTok was born as a “music dancing app”. When creating dance moves to fit a specific part of a song, naturally many older songs, especially the ones from the 2000s, also gained their choreography side by side with the contemporary hits. For example, Hung Up, by Madonna, became a dance trend in 2024, where people would copy her dance moves like the live performances from when the song was released.
More than dancing, TikTok became a place to share your interests and also discover new ones. The platform settled as somewhere to make music accessible, both to promote new artists and to bring back songs from the old times. Along with other artistic expressions, such as movies and TV shows, a new trend was born: consuming ‘vintage’ culture was popular again. The series Stranger Things, for example, played a major role in the comeback of 80s lifestyle, especially on fashion and musical aspects. In 2022, on the release of its fourth season, the TV show helped to put the song “Running Up That Hill”, by Kate Bush, at the top of the charts.
But if you think Stranger Things has full credit on this, the full perspective needs to be addressed. By the time of its release, the fourth season of this series was highly anticipated by all of its fans, who naturally made up a large portion of the audience from TikTok. Basically, Stranger Things 4 was extremely famous even before the release date — so when it finally launched, people were talking about it non-stop. And this song, has a particular significance for the narrative, so the fans were also playing it, making videos with and about it, non-stop. The result was remarkable: the song has reached a position it didn’t even reach when it was first released, in 1985.
And with that, many other songs from the same decade started trending again, featuring dance moves that were easy to follow, video montages of a famous celebrity or even sharing your own photos with some music playing in the background. Another famous trend started with the song “Forever Young”, released in 1984 by the band Alphaville: fans of celebrities who were famous in the past used the lyrics of this 80s hit to highlight the different eras of that actor, singer or artist. With the lyricism of remembering good old times, wishing to be young for a lifetime, the song fits perfectly with the effort to recall someone’s prime era or the memory of someone who has passed away.
When we talk about consuming and producing culture, retro art also plays a major role in the lives of today’s young people. But this isn’t the first time (nor will it be the last) that a social media platform has revived hits from the past.
Tumblr thrives: sad girl era & grunge lifestyle
Gaining its popularity in the early 2010s, Tumblr left its mark on an entire generation with the “sad girl aesthetic”. This style of content is built around the romanticization of melancholy and vulnerability, where quotes from Sylvia Plath‘s books and the Skins character Effy Stonem’s words were published non-stop, usually followed by grainy black-and-white photos.
From a musical perspective, many artists such as Lana del Rey and Arctic Monkeys were the main soundtrack, and their style brought back memories of slightly older artists, like the 90s hits from Fiona Apple and The Strokes. Sometimes they even took us on a full-fledged trip back to the 60s and 70s with The Beatles, and The Jam, recreating the instrumental style and typical lyrics of each era.
Following the themes of agony and social apathy, Tumblr also made the 90s grunge style fashionable again. The clothing trend of ripped denim and flannel shirts was the outline of 2010s grunge, and the musical landscape included the most memorable from the 20th century’s last decades, such as Nirvana, Joy Division, and Alice in Chains.
Things that were visually appealing and easily reproducible often became popular on this social network. Since its layout featured text, images and short gifs, the most striking lyrics, along with clips and pictorial elements that drew the most attention, naturally went viral.
It’s a copy of a copy: why is 2014 the new ‘retro’?
Even though it brought back many different styles, mainly from the 90s, Tumblr created its own aesthetic and became a role model as the internet’s “good old times”. Clothes, music and even the way people edit their photos can mean something is tumblr: more than a social media platform, it became a whole new aesthetic — and TikTok might be the leader of this style’s revival.
A new trend started in 2025, where people would bring back elements, especially from a musical and visual perspective, from Tumblr’s prime era, trying to bring the idea of “we were happy and we didn’t even know it”. Being tumblr is now nostalgic, even though it was popular 10 years ago. Why do we have this sensation of longing with something so recent, compared to other aesthetics and cultural expressions?
Nostalgia is now so inserted in the cultural industry that it isn’t an emotion anymore, but a sort of product. In a world full of corporations searching for something to rely on, even a human feeling becomes a piece of merchandise. Besides the gold rush to find a new lifestyle or passion to be sold, our society is moving way too fast.
Coming back to the social media discourse, that’s how Tumblr aesthetics and music also became a part of the global time machine as something that happened a long time ago, putting Halsey’s prime as far on time as ABBA’s greatest hits. When we realize this, it’s possible to see how our perception of what is in the past is changing more rapidly. While looking for good things to rely on in history’s background, we find similar things in a not-so-distant past — also because, even when music reinvents itself, we always keep the classic old references in new songs: just like a perfect time machine.
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The article above was edited by Giovanna Rodrigues.
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