How The Algorithm Stripped The Soul Out Of Songwriting
I’m sure you’ve experienced this ritual: a baby boomer, raised on The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, encounters a viral hit from TikTok and declares it terrible. “Today’s music,” he insists to his Gen Z interlocutor, is less melodic, less introspective, less human. Where, he asks, is the aching release of “Hey Jude,” the slow climb of “Stairway to Heaven,” the sense that a song might reveal something rather than simply repeat itself?
The charge is not entirely wrong. Engineering modern mainstream music often involves repeating wide-net choruses between forgettable verses, occasionally throwing in a bridge. Music from the 1960s and ’70s may have followed the same recipe, but there was something soulful about the hits of the past that cemented them as diamonds, still rediscoverable decades later.
What has changed is not the presence of emotional expression, but the conditions under which the feeling must be expressed. Music, like language, bends to the medium that carries it. And in the 2020s, that medium is not the radio dial, but the social media algorithm.
In the mid-20th century, the journey from artist to audience resembled a procession. Songs were written, recorded with real instruments, and released into a relatively stable system of promotion — labels, radio stations, critics, and live performances. Gatekeepers stood between creation and consumption, and while their power constrained access, it also created coherence. When The Rolling Stones released “Gimme Shelter” or The Doors released “Light My Fire,” those songs did not arrive as 15-second fragments but as complete statements.
The listener, in turn, was patient. Songs could begin slowly, even experimentally, because they were not competing against the infinite scroll. One hears echoes of this in the structure of the music baby boomers grew up loving, with its extended intros and guitar solos.
The all-male band was the most popular construct in the 1960s, and they sang about women, or their cars, or the politics of the times. Their music gave a collective voice to American angst, and young people of both sexes tuned in. Men could sing vulnerably without losing status — think of John Lennon singing “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” or Robert Plant crooning through “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”
Today, male performers in the mainstream are often relegated to the “alternative” and “indie” margins unless they adopt a flamboyant, androgynous, or “gay-coded” persona. Think of a Harry Styles or a Benson Boone, who cynics say are “reheating David Bowie’s nachos.”
Meanwhile, much of contemporary pop is driven by women like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter, who dissect, mock, or satirize male behavior. How we see each other has changed, exasperated by the isolated listening environment of TikTok and Spotify.
Music is a product, and the sales funnel itself has inverted. In the 1960s and ’70s, a song was crafted in its entirety, then disseminated to a mass audience through channels requiring human interaction. Today, a fragment — a hook, a beat, a lyric — typically must first succeed on social media before a listener seeks out the full track on streaming platforms.
Viral moments become the gateway to streams, which become revenue, which feeds the algorithm that promotes them. Repetition, how well a song snippet loops, and whether a sound can become a meme or a trend are the benchmarks prioritized over gradual development or poetic subtlety. It’s why older listeners often interpret modern pop as shallow: it is designed to survive in a highly competitive digital ecosystem.
Yet even as the algorithm fragments culture, paradoxically, it also generates fleeting collectivism. TikTok’s “viral sound” functions as a shared chant — millions of users internalizing the same beat or lyric, remixing it, and spreading it across feeds. Sometimes, a meaningful trend will emerge, like the use of Radiohead’s “Let Down” or Twenty One Pilots’ “Drag Path.” (Notably, the former is decades old and the latter shot into the mainstream from a dedicated fanbase on the fringes.) Unlike the sustained unity of Beatlemania, however, these moments spike and vanish from public consciousness within days, leaving micro-cultures rather than mass movements.
And yet, amid digital acceleration, Gen Z has pursued a tangible connection to music. Vinyl sales in the United States surpassed $1 billion in 2025, led by contemporary stars like Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar, alongside enduring classic albums like Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
But even as music consumers buy vinyl records, the contrast with the 1960s is instructive. Then, music unified people, giving them a sense of shared identity; now, our private playlists display the sound of our interior worlds.
Music isn’t dead, but finding its soul is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. What a baby boomer calls “terrible” isn’t emptiness so much as speed. When a culture cannot sit still long enough to reflect on its inability to sit still and reflect, meaningful music will rarely meet the mainstream. The drumbeat of soul-catching music pounds beneath the floorboards of digital platforms, waiting for those who will pause, listen, and dig it out.