DJ Paul, a founder of the Oscar-winning Memphis hip-hop group Three 6 Mafia, was enjoying some tequila at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills two years ago when a friend shoved a cellphone in front of him. The rapper was surprised to see TikTok videos uploaded by “young white girls” dancing and rhyming along to one of the coarser moments from “Half on a Sack,” a slightly menacing song the group released 17 years earlier. The lyrics described sex and drug use on a tour bus.
“I’m like, ‘Whoa,’” he remembered in an interview, laughing. “And when I do my concerts, you see the same kind of girls out there singing that line. They go crazy.”
Paul said that “Half on a Sack” had long been a staple of the group’s live set lists, but the crowd response has been more uproarious in the wake of its viral moment.
The rapper Project Pat, who has been touring with Three 6 Mafia this year, said he regularly performed “Life We Live,” his 23-year-old song that’s been used in almost three million TikTok videos. It’s seen a 130 percent increase in Spotify streams, as well.
“I always looked at the rap game as a business,” Pat said. “I didn’t never look at it like I’m putting my pain and all that” into the art. “If you gon’ pay for this, I’m gonna tell you what you want to hear,” he added in his distinctive Memphis accent.
Paul and Pat are among the musical acts benefiting from the capricious, catholic taste of a generation of listeners who came of age with access to nearly the entire catalog of recorded music via streaming services and social media. Younger listeners are finding songs from Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Blonde Redhead and discovering artists across genres and eras through TikTok, YouTube and other digital platforms; and the musicians are in turn welcoming new audiences offline via vinyl reissues and live performances. And what’s more, these listeners are often gravitating to songs that weren’t marketed as singles when they were first released.
Pavement, an alt-rock band with a devoted but modest following, was inactive when “Harness Your Hopes,” a B-side released in 1997, began gaining streaming momentum a few years ago. But as the band prepared for a reunion tour in 2022, it knew the song had to be part of its live show. First, its members would need to relearn it. Bob Nastanovich, the group member who puts together their set lists, estimated they’d played it “probably less than five times in the ’90s.”
“Harness Your Hopes” has since become a tour staple tactically deployed in the second half of shows or as an encore, since newer fans might leave after hearing it. “We wanted all those people that were familiar with less than five or 10 Pavement songs to hear the rest of the set in the hopes that they might like more of our music,” he said.
Though the music industry (not to mention the federal government) has a stormy relationship with TikTok, the platform has become a key part of the live music business, connecting Gen Z users with new artists and introducing the catalogs of established acts that are still on the road.
“Tongue Tied,” the exuberantly adolescent single by the dance-pop band Grouplove, was a minor hit after its release in 2011, but a new generation of wide-eyed kids found it the perfect soundtrack for their TikTok videos of graduation and freshman year antics. Clocking the renewed zeal, the band’s touring agent, Julie Greenberg, began booking it on the college circuit. “We were touring them in different rooms simply because we knew we had a new demo from TikTok,” Greenberg said.
Trey Many, senior vice president at the touring agency Wasserman Music, called the catalog resurgence fueled by social media and streaming “one of the bigger sea changes” he’s seen in his decades-long career. Those platforms sometimes offer fans instant access to buy tickets for a tour, though he noted that there’s not an “exact correlation between streaming numbers and concert attendance.” Just because someone participated in a dance challenge or made a meme doesn’t mean they’re going to shell out money for a ticket.
But when passion and opportunity align, the impact is unmistakable. Beach House, a band Many has worked with for nearly two decades, reached a new level of success when its “Space Song” (2015) was featured in a 2021 meme in which the actor Pedro Pascal seamlessly transitioned from laughter to trembling sobs. (The evolution of a piece of internet ephemera is nothing if not surprising and specific.)
When Beach House toured in 2022, Many saw teenagers lined up at the venues hours early. “You could tell they’d been there all day because they all had 7-Eleven bags and were eating Cheetos,” he said. The speed of ticket sales that year was “dramatically different” too. “Space Song” now has more than one billion Spotify streams.
Robin Guthrie, a guitarist and founding member of the cult Scottish band Cocteau Twins, remembers looking into the crowd at shows during the band’s 1980s heyday and seeing mostly men, “lots of punks, and there was lots of people with spiky hair.” The band’s digital audience has changed drastically: Now its fan base includes young women aged 15 to 25, according to data from streaming services and short-form video platforms like TikTok.
This renaissance is largely attributable to a single song: “Sea, Swallow Me,” the opening track from “The Moon and the Melodies,” the group’s 1986 collaboration with the avant-garde composer Harold Budd. The quasi-ambient album wasn’t billed as a Cocteau Twins record when it was released, and the band’s pianist Simon Raymonde doesn’t recall them ever performing “Sea, Swallow Me” live.
“We’re at three million monthly listeners on Spotify,” Raymonde said, “and that’s way more than it should be for a band like ours, who haven’t put out a record in forever and never really achieved mainstream success in any way.”
Since early 2022, TikTok users have created more than 1.4 million videos soundtracked by the gusting mournfulness of “Sea, Swallow Me” — clips of barren landscapes and mellow car rides, as well as scenes from film and TV depicting heartache and depression. To ride the groundswell of enthusiasm, the band reissued a remastered version of the album on vinyl for the first time in August. “Sea, Swallow Me” grew 25 percent in streams on Spotify during 2023, becoming the band’s second-most played song on the app.
Raymonde, who also runs the U.K.-based independent record label Bella Union, considers catalog resurgence via social media the “weirdest phenomenon in music in the last 20 years.”
The members of Cocteau Twins are split about the magic at play. Guthrie said he was unsure about the depth of Gen Z’s curiosity, pointing out that two of the band’s most played songs on Spotify are opening tracks. Raymonde was more sanguine about the serendipity. “It’s an incredibly beautiful thing to see happening and nobody spent any money on it,” he said.
“That’s the other really important part; there’s no campaign going on,” he added. “No one is sitting around in an office going, ‘Hmm, I think we could have a TikTok hit with this.’ Of course, there are people doing that at record companies, no doubt — looking at these isolated, strange things and going, ‘How can we make that happen?’ And I would say the answer is you can’t make it happen.”
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