origin stories:internet music

Design by Sienna Leone

By Farah Rincon

Picture this: It’s 2014. You run to your room and slam the door shut. You rush to your desk, where you have numerous polaroids taped up right next to your Lana Del Rey vinyl. You reach for the desktop computer and immediately log onto Tumblr to check out what your favorite fan pages reblogged this week. Through the endless clicking and scrolling, you come across unfamiliar bands that have been posted on your feed. Who are the Arctic Monkeys? Why is everyone talking about Marina and the Diamonds? The 1975? Sky Ferreira? Why is everyone bringing up all this music? 

As the years progress, the process of logging onto your favorite social media platform and discovering new artists has been killed and revived a couple of different times. While I was not around for the MySpace era, I definitely remember the rush of logging onto Tumblr and listening to snippets of Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing,” reading poetic lyrics from The 1975, and seeing screencaps from Lana Del Rey music videos. After the tragic fall of Tumblr, the process is initiated once again with the younger side of Gen Z. TikTok has massively impacted the music industry and paved the way for artists like Doja Cat, Lil Nas X, PinkPantheress, and Olivia Rodrigo. The beauty with this reincarnation of “Internet Music” is that each era carries a distinct sound, shaping a new generation with the creation of niche subcultures. 

The most notable introduction to social media is the invention of MySpace in 2003. The website had birthed subcultures of early 2000s Emo and Scene kids, and more importantly, Internet Music as we know it today. A New York Times article from 2005 referred to MySpace as “a place to maintain their home pages, which they often decorate with garish artwork, intimate snapshots and blogs filled with frank and often ribald commentary on their lives, all linked to the home pages of friends.” Paving the way with platforms we use now, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, MySpace allowed for users to not only interact with friends online, but use customizable features on their profile with different layouts, graphics, and most distinguishably, music of your choice for your followers to listen to. By having MySpace members share their favorite singers and bands on their profile, the social media website formed a strong online music community. At its peak with 75 million users, several artists had created a MySpace page to post their demos and interact with fans. This paved the way for smaller artists at the time, like Lily Allen and Soulja Boy. These artists recruited an army of followers that listened to their music on the site and eventually became household names. Bigger bands like My Chemical Romance also gained popularity through MySpace. The band performed at a MySpace sponsored event called “The List,” where fans got their first taste of their 2006 album, “The Black Parade.”

MySpace died off around 2009, in spite of that, Internet Music lived on. As the years progressed, the 2007 social media platform, Tumblr, rose to popularity in 2013. The aftermath of this resulted in an era-defining moment of the 2010s. Different from MySpace, the site focused more on the experience of “blogging” rather than networking with friends. There were over 42 million blogs on Tumblr in 2012, each with a different aesthetically pleasing profile to admire over for hours on your computer. Amongst the variety of subcultures that emerged from the site, the most notable one had to be the “Tumblr Girl.” The Tumblr Girl was trendy, fashionable, effortlessly beautiful, and mostly listened to alternative/indie records on her vinyls. The Tumblr Girl was an icon that many users on the platform (including myself) had desperately aspired to be. Often associated with the term, alternative music that was often posted on the website was a crucial element to achieving this aesthetic. Artists such as the Arctic Monkeys, Lana Del Rey, Sky Ferreira, and Marina (formerly known as Marina and The Diamonds) had gained a specific following on the website for their notable melancholic aesthetic. From this, a new era of Internet Music emerged. Tumblr has infamously popularized the “Sad Girl” aesthetic by discovering artists with a predominantly gloomy vibe and reblogging their content.  The lyric “But I crumble completely when you cry” from Arctic Monkeys’ “505”  had been copied and pasted behind a black and white grid background and posted onto the platform, contributing to the “Sad Girl” energy. The pursuit of becoming the next Tumblr girl had resulted in teenagers copying Lana Del Rey’s flower crown from her “Born to Die'' music video  and slipping on an American Apparel skirt as seen on Sky Ferreira’s live performances. It was almost as if the subculture had created a secret code through their choice of clothing and music in order for Tumblr users to recognize each other from a mile away. The impact of music through the social media website had created a movement that a significant number of Tumblr users had been part of in the 2010s, and still reminisce over today. Due to its temporary removal on the iOS App Store around 2018, Tumblr decided to ban sexually explicit images on the platform, resulting in its slow death over the years. 

The reincarnation of Internet Music today has drastically changed in terms of what we’ve seen before. Instead of relying on our friend’s music feed or reblogs of beautifully placed lyrics on our computer, we have adapted to short thirty second clips on our phone as we endlessly scroll for hours on end. TikTok has dominated the internet with fashion, politics, pop-culture, and of course, music amongst the youth today. After its rebrand from Musical.ly in 2018, an app where users could lip-sync in their videos and post them online, TikTok had a broader range of content and promoted itself in a different manner. The app gained massive popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, gaining about 28 million users online. TikTok’s ability to pair any sound to a video has influenced the music industry massively. Doja Cat’s “Say So” had become a quarantine anthem, as millions of users were dancing to the catchy pop song and posting them on the app. Similarly, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” took over the charts after its popularity on TikTok. Not only these recognizable singers gained fame from the app, but underground independent artists as well.Singers like PinkPantheress and CoCo & Clair Clair have a niche following on the app, allowing them to emerge from the underground scene. 

From the MySpace emo era, to the Sad Girl aesthetics of Tumblr, and the current day dances on TikTok, the death and rebirth of Internet Music is inevitable. It's difficult to picture pop-culture today without the subgenres that stem from the Internet. No one can predict when or how this process will be over and begin again, but it will likely make an impact on the upcoming generation, just like it did for the generations before us.