For our capstone project, we wanted to explore the way that the internet era of music, and most specifically TikTok, has changed the way that we perceive, create, and share music. We were inspired to pursue this project because we have both been avid music listeners our whole lives, and have been concerned about the recent trends that we have been observing in our online music spaces especially since the pandemic. We’ve seen other people online and in real life also commenting on these issues pretty consistently, so we wanted to see if we could find a deeper systemic pattern to the trends that we were noticing.

The first theme that we discovered was that the convenience and lowered cost of music makes us inevitably devalue it, as we can easily find new music online on a whim if we don’t perfectly like whatever we’re listening to, so there is far less incentive to try and understand an album or song deeply and give it a solid chance. This leads into the second theme, where this devaluation of music is further amplified by the integration of music into social media, and especially TikTok, where placing music at the center of memeable trends distances the music from the original context and artist’s intent, instead letting the listener completely decide what context the music should be listened to in, which creates a strong imbalance in the relationship between artist and listener. The third theme that we found was that these online cultures around music have extended into the real world through toxic concert culture, making the most profitable revenue stream for artists an incredibly difficult environment to be in with fans yelling things during quiet songs, throwing things on stage, and only knowing the artists’ TikTok hits. From this, in the fourth theme we found that parasocial relationships have also increased substantially through the social media age and especially TikTok, with there being far less expectation of privacy for even much more niche artists, making sharing music online and having any sort of online persona incredibly difficult and sometimes even unsafe to sustain. Finally, in our fifth theme we found that expectedly these issues have a much deeper impact on artists compared to music listeners, and when artists get the short end of this current power imbalance, there’s little that they can do to remedy these issues when the people listening to them don’t seem to be nearly as bothered by these issues as the artists are.