But is TikTok still driving actual discovery, or just engagement that never leaves the app? New data show that lots of young folks are discovering music they like on TikTok and then moving on. A recent study by top music industry research firm MiDia revealed that 16- to 24-year-olds who discovered a new artist they "loved" on TikTok or Instagram went on to listen to more songs by that artist only 19% of the time. If artist discovery is both beginning and ending on TikTok and Instagram Reels for the next generation of music fans, that's not a good thing for the music industry..

To dig a little deeper, the Stems research team analyzed data on how many songs from the TikTok top 100 tracks chart also appeared on the Spotify top 100 tracks chart, examining similar eight-week periods over the last four years (April/May 2022-2025).

Of the 1,491 songs that made it onto TikTok’s top 100 tracks list during that time, roughly 13% of them — 194 tracks — also made it onto Spotify’s top 100.

The number gets even smaller when you look at how many of these hits originated on TikTok, vs. songs that had other drivers — e.g., songs from established artists with social marketing teams behind them, playing concerts and awards shows, with music videos on YouTube, etc. Put another way: how many songs are big because they are on TikTok, and how many are on TikTok because they are big?

More than half of the 194 songs appearing on both charts came from major stars like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Morgan Wallen, or artists a step or two down artists getting a push through more traditional marketing channels. The remaining 45% were split between older songs that have reemerged on TikTok — like Radiohead’s “Let Down” or Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” — and actual TikTok discoveries like Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby.”

So how many songs can you unequivocally say were broken on TikTok? 46 out of 1491 tracks — or barely 3% of the songs in the top 100. Yes, some of those 46 songs were enormous hits, like Shaboozey’s “Tipsy.” But many have questioned whether artists such as Richman and Shaboozey have the followings to keep the hits coming (see: Jon Caramanica’s piece from last December on hit songs without pop stars). To go back to MiDia’s point: if most music fans on TikTok aren’t leaving the platform to hear more, how do artists build careers?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! Hit me at [email protected].

“The Cars importance, like that of so many rock bands, will prove to be mostly subliminal,” wrote Bill Flanagan for Trouser Press in 1979. They “will make their history [on car radios] and every teenager will associate some personal memory with a Cars song.” 

That pretty much nails it. I was one of those teenagers, growing up in the band’s home state of Massachusetts in the 1980s. It might say something about the subliminal nature of the Cars that, despite the time and the place, nobody I knew called them their favorite band, or would have been able to ID any of the bandmembers other than Ric Ocasek in a Stop & Shop line – not even drummer David Robinson, who lived one town over from us. But that run of singles from the early albums — “Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Just What I Needed,” “You’re All I Got Tonight,” “Let’s Go” — were always present on the radio, huge and hooky but also just slightly odd and arch enough to never get old. 

We didn’t know that the Cars were also, in the words of Peter Buck, “a cautionary tale on how not to run a band,” as author Blll Janovitz lays out in The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told (Da Capo). The story begins with odd couple Ocasek and fellow Ohioan Ben Orr — one of them tall, awkward and arty, the other one hunky and golden-voiced, both pretty emotionally bottled-up. After a long, threadbare slog through the clubs of Cleveland and Boston in an assortment of bands with names like Cap’n Swing and Richard and the Rabbits, it’s thrilling when they finally find the right group of musicians: guitarist Elliot Easton, keyboardist Greg Hawkes, and drummer Robinson, the latter of whom had played with the Modern Lovers and seems to jolt the band into their New Wave future. But you never get the sense from Stories that the Cars really gelled as people.

It’s hard not to lay most of the blame at the feet of bandleader Ocasek. He comes across as sometimes charming, quirkily talented, and driven — but also insecure, narcissistic, and, when he felt challenged, icily remote. The relationship between Ocasek and Orr embodies the emotional hole at the heart of the band: The two couldn’t have been more different, often in complementary ways — Ocasek would call the charismatic, easy-going Orr “the light to my dark,” and Orr’s rich vocals worked perfectly with Ocasek’s beatnik lyrics. But instead of that leading to more creative sparks à la Mick and Keith or John and Paul, Ocasek and Orr only became increasingly distant after the first album. Ocasek refused to give the rest of the band songwriting credits, even though their arrangements were crucial elements of the band’s best work. He left his first wife, Constance, and their two sons behind in Ohio when he moved to Boston, and was a distant father and husband to his second wife Suzanne and middle two sons. He would start a third family with model Paulina Poritzkova, 20 years his junior, and be a devoted father to a third pair of sons before he died at age 75, in 2019. In a sad final act before his death, he would cut his first two sets of children almost entirely out of his will.

The musical tragedy of the Cars is that Ric Ocasek couldn’t fully embrace the great band in front of him. Janovitz, who also leads Buffalo Tom, captures this with the empathy of a fellow musician who knows how hard it is to make a dent in the record business. Sometimes this gets in the way: the making-of-the-album chapters can get bogged down in production detail. (I had to power through the section highlighting Ocasek’s “signature eighth-note downstrokes” on Candy-O.) But like the excellent 2020 Bee Gees documentary, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, Let the Stories Be Told gives a picture of the real life music business – full of capricious zigs and zags, petty tensions and bruised egos, and friendships and families that don’t survive – and how great music can come out of it anyway.