By skyforbes 
Quantifying TikTok’s impact on music popularity
This essay was originally published in Stat Significant, a weekly newsletter featuring data-centric essays about movies, music, and TV.
It’s Probably a TikTok Thing
Every so often, the media selects a single cultural phenomenon to decode the actions of an entire generation. Consequently, journalistic explorations of teen culture — whether that be for Gen Z or Millennials — are filtered through the prism of a single musician, movie, or technology. Historical examples include:
- Teenage Baby Boomers and Beatlemania
- Gen X apathy, Nirvana’s album Nevermind, and every action of Kurt Cobain
- Millennial adoption of peer-to-peer social networks and the rise of meme culture
Post-COVID, TikTok has emerged as a cultural cipher for interpreting the habits of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, with every baffling trend attributed (quite lazily) to a short-form video app.
- For confusing slang: “It’s probably a TikTok thing.”
- For newfangled health trends: “That sounds like a TikTok thing.”
- For every piece of new…