TikTok's algorithm has changed the way hits are made

TikTok isn’t factored into a song’s rank on the Billboard charts, but it can have an impact

Billboard ranks a song’s chart position based on its radio airplay, its physical sales, and its streaming numbers (across Spotify and other platforms), but doesn’t include user-generated content, meaning it doesn’t include TikTok videos. Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s managing director of charts and data operations, notes that TikTok still has an impact, though, because listeners will often stream the app’s most popular songs on other platforms.

TikTok is resurrecting sampled songs

Rapper Doechii's song "Anxiety" has become a bona fide chart hit. Interestingly, its popularity on TikTok propelled Gotye's "Somebody I Used to Know" (the song Doechii's song samples) and Sleep Hallow's "A N X I E T Y" (a song that samples the Doechii song) onto the charts as well.

Music today is often intended to circulate on social media

Artists are increasingly using TikTok and other short form video platforms as a space to promote their music. One scholar notes this emphasis, and connect it to Taylor Swift's early use of social media to promote her own work and brand.

Billie Eilish and TikTok helped inspire a bossa nova resurgence

Eilish's 2021 song "Billie Bossa Nova" along with a handful of other younger artists, like Laufey and Beabadoobee, have inspired Gen Z's interest in the genre, with the music soundtracking tens of thousands of videos on TikTok.

How TikTok ate the internet

TikTok is now deeply integrated into American culture, thanks to the app’s powerful algorithm and focus on entertainment which have influenced popular trends and social media content consumption in the US. This immersive piece highlights TikTok’s role in helping shape everything from music to fashion and even politics in the US—while its connection to China has also drawn scrutiny and raised national security concerns.

TikTok's personalized algorithm activates the brain's reward system

A 2025 Washington Post study found that 75% of the TikTok users it studied nearly doubled their time spent on the app within a month. Experts in design and psychiatry say this is due to the app's interface and algorithm, which, after learning about the user's preferences, recommend videos more likely to activate that person's dopamine reward system than non-personalized suggestions.

Several major artists have embraced manipulating the Billboard charts

Billboard is supposed to be an accurate, objective representation of the country’s listening habits, but artists and their fans have discovered ways to manipulate the magazine’s methodology in order to push tracks to the top of the charts. In 2018, Taylor Swift rewarded fans for purchasing her album multiple times; in 2020, Justin Bieber reposted suggestions that fans repeatedly stream one of his songs while they sleep.

In 2025, an AI-generated song became a country hit

The song, “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust, racked up over 3 million streams on Spotify in less than a month and went to number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales in early November 2025. Because the genre prides itself on authenticity and has a long history of workaday songwriters, the song's success was controversial in the industry. Billboard does not currently have a policy prohibiting AI-generated songs.

TikTok's 'sonic logo' imprints the app's identity across platforms

As the app's popular videos spread to other platforms like Instagram and Reddit, the company sought a way to alert viewers that the content originated on TikTok. They decided on the sonic logo that now acts as a bumper on all of its shared videos, to attract users.

Social media algorithms are shaping real-life language through memes

The evolution of the internet in the early 2000s supercharged the creation and spread of memetic content. Now, highly tuned algorithms on platforms like TikTok and YouTube influence the language, phrasing, and content of creators, which shapes how we use language in the real world.

TikTok's top 10 users have over 1B followers

Influencers like Charli D'Amelio and MrBeast, as well as more traditional stars like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, produce content that keep people scrolling.

Country's sound continues to evolve

Country music is having a moment. In 2023, it saw the biggest growth in market share of any genre—up nearly 22%. This overview traces country’s rise from Appalachian folk roots to its current pop, rock, and hip-hop-infused wave, with artists like Beyoncé and Post Malone joining the mix.

Why TikTok loves Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems like an odd fit: A social media app known for bite-sized videos and a long-dead Austrian poet. Despite the odds, Rilke, especially his famous "Letters to a Young Poet," has become an unexpected trend on TikTok, where influencers share his wisdom on creativity and self-discovery.

How Spotify creates niche genres

One of Spotify's most recognizable features is its playlists. The provider offers an endless stream of strangely titled mixes with names like "Hyperpop," "Phonk," and "Lorem," which suggest uniform genres and scenes despite featuring seemingly random assortments of artists and songs. This article unpacks why Spotify organizes its music in this way and how, unintentionally, the process erases organic movements that developed outside of the app.

Streaming helped propel Bad Bunny to the top of the charts

For decades, labels believed Spanish-language artists had to sing in English to break into the mainstream. Metrics on YouTube and Spotify, though, have shown that listeners are interested in artists like Bad Bunny, who have intentionally made music in Spanish and have become immensely popular.

How the YouTube algorithm works, according to MrBeast

In this brief interview clip, the YouTube savant "MrBeast" summarizes how the YouTube algorithm—which he relies on to make his content go viral—actually works.

Why Robyn's 'Dancing on My Own' became an anthem

Robyn's "Dancing on My Own," was a low-key hit when it was released in 2010, but it's become an anthem in the time since then, influencing artists like Lorde and Charli xcx and inspiring an iconic scene on HBO's "Girls." This article breaks down why that is, studying the song's beats per minute, which match humans' typical walking pace, and the queer experience reflected in its lyrics.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Billboard's early music charts were racially segregated

In 1942, the publication introduced the Harlem Hit Parade chart, listing the top 10 records sold at select record stores in the majority-Black borough of New York. In 1945, it changed the chart’s name to Most Played Juke Box Race Records, using the music industry term (“race record”) that identified recordings by Black artists, even if they played music markedly similar to the white artists on the other charts.

Hip-hop gained significant popularity in the 21st century

Although hip-hop and rap music were popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was ubiquitous in the early 2000s, with 20 songs in the Billboard top 10 in 2003 alone. The surge was due in no small part to Jay-Z and Eminem, who were the biggest names in the genre.

'Lazy Sunday' was YouTube's first viral hit

Initially aired on television, the 2005 "Saturday Night Live" digital short featuring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell took off on YouTube, becoming one of the platform's first viral videos. The song may be a joke, but its success underscored how online video could extend the lifespan of regularly televised content.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

A 19-month-old boy went viral for his natural drumming skills

A mother gifted her husband a drum set for Christmas, but was surprised to find their young child take a liking to the instrument. The musician couple noticed that over time the young boy taught himself proper form and how to keep up with the beat of the music. TikToks they filmed of their son went viral and amassed millions of views.

Dolly Parton danced with disco in the late 1970s

As disco grew more popular, more artists experimented with the genre, including through remixes. One of them was Dolly Parton, who released the “Dance With Dolly” EP in 1978, which remixed two tracks from her “Heartbreaker” album to make them more explicitly aimed at the dancefloor.

Yodeling wasn't intended to be music

Alpine herders originally used the technique to call cattle. When it made its way to the US, in the South and Appalachia, yodeling was a popular singing style in "hillbilly music," which eventually evolved into country.

The 'Ratatouille' musical started as a joke on TikTok

It all started as a meme: What if “Ratatouille” were adapted for the stage? Just a few months later, though, it was an actual production, featuring genuine Broadway stars.

The history of the 808, the drum machine that changed pop music

Roland's TR-808 is one of the most consequential pieces of gear in the history of popular music, providing the framework for innovative hip-hop, dance, and pop records in the early 1980s.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Fireworks make a loud booming sound after exploding due to air expanding faster than the speed of sound.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

US housing costs have risen by roughly 175% between 1991 and 2026—but a growing number of Gen Zers are becoming homeowners anyway. In 2025, 4% of homebuyers were Gen Z, up from 3% the year before.

Studies suggest when you sleep is as important as how much you get, and syncing with your circadian rhythms may lead to less fatigue and improved long-term health outcomes

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

While El Niño moves warm Pacific Ocean waters east along the equator, La Niña moves them west, shifting where rainfall will become more common for months.

Experimental hantavirus vaccines and therapies, still under development, have long been funded by the US military.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Tattoos remain visible on your skin thanks to immune cells called macrophages