Flatness by design

Is "flat-sounding" pop music a product of streaming, or a youth movement hiding in plain sight?

It’s now a relatively widely accepted assertion, backed by a bunch of surveys and data, that the music we listen to during adolescence goes a long way to shaping our long-term musical tastes. I’d take that assertion even further and suggest that it’s the songs, albums and mixtapes which soundtrack the seemingly endless teenage summers of youth that have the most impact on us.

Even now, certain songs and albums take me straight back - renting Siamese Dream and Live Through This from the library in summer ‘95; the inescapability of Wannabe in the post-Euros summer of 1996. Even songs that I don’t choose to listen to any more can have that effect - a chance spin of Red Chili Peppers’ Californication and Scar Tissue evoked vivid summer ‘99 vibes this week.

Even though everyone’s songs of the summer remain resolutely personal, there was often enough of a sense of a critical mass for portions of the media to anoint one particular song to be the “soundtrack to the summer”. Some obvious contenders - Crazy in Love from summer 2003, Baby One More Time in summer 1999, I Gotta Feeling for summer 2009. Your own experience will vary, but such songs were popular enough to receive “song of the summer” status.

And despite the increased recognition that the dominant media narrative doesn’t reflect everyone, there is still a desire to anoint one (or perhaps a few) jams with the song of the summer epithet. 2024 was “Brat summer”, but Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter also received plenty of votes for standout track. As It Was or Running Up That Hill would be solid votes for 2022.

But this year, the vibe I get from my media circles is that there is no song of the summer. Looking at chart placings, you’d argue for Alex Warren’s Ordinary (a Love Is All Around for the TikTok generation, perhaps) - but can a song called Ordinary really do summer vibes? Or, chatting to some of the parents in my office, it’s all about K-pop Demon Hunters. But still, the headlines, such as this from the Wall Street Journal, bemoan the lack of a single defining anthem.

The team at Chartmetric suggest that, in place of a proper pop anthem for the summer, music “found its cultural pulse in reunion tours”. Oasis have dominated the headlines in this regard, we’ve also seen Pulp come back strong, alongside the emotional final Black Sabbath show and the forthcoming return (is it a reunion if you didn’t officially break up?) of Radiohead in the Autumn. There’s certainly enough nostalgia sloshing around our cultural zeitgeist for this to be a cogent argument.

But, as the dominance of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill showed in 2022, we’ve done nostalgic summer anthems before. It needs to be one song to really catch the moment - something that captures that critical creative alchemy of being familiar enough that sticks in our heads, but just edgy and different enough to capture our consideration at the vital moment.

Plenty of people feel that same creative alchemy is out of kilter in modern culture - that we’ve sanded the edges and differentials down in favour of familiarity and unobtrusiveness. This Bluesky thread in response to some of the big songs of 2025 exemplifies the point - “thousands of other songs that sound identical”, “sounds like…TikTok trending audio” and a feeling that musicians design popular songs exclusively for “the algorithm”.

For what it’s worth, I tend to disagree with the commenters on the songs in the NPR piece that thread refers to. Sombr’s “back to friends” is a jam.

There’s plenty of great music out there in the world - and it’s always worth remembering that the charts only demonstrate popularity, not cultural clout. Sometimes those two markers crossover; sometimes they don’t, and we can only see influence in the rearview mirror. Plus, we (as in adults) aren’t meant to understand the appeal of “young people’s music”. That’s the point! It’s not for us - it’s the soundtrack to endless school holiday summers with zero parenting responsibilities.

For all that those of us who already had our music tastes fixed as teenagers might feel disconnected from “the youth” and the charts, and decry its flatness as a result, there IS some evidence of the edges of popular culture getting sanded down in the name of popularity.

Lofi Girl is one of the most popular mainstays on YouTube, with a constantly running livestream of music that provides chilled-out beats for 15 million channel subscribers. But, according to this excellent piece in 404 Media (paywalled now), part of the channel’s growth has come at the expense of its original style:

“While Lofi Girl once firmly fit within the genre of lofi hip hop, known for pairing relaxed—but still thumping—beats with nostalgic sound samples, its music has largely dropped the hip hop. Lofi Girl's music is now simply its own genre: lofi, where the soft, tonal consistency means it can be hard for the average listener to even see its works as distinct songs. The drum beats of the "chill beats to relax/study to" sometimes even take a backseat to the rounded, flighty melodies.”

As 404 goes on to highlight, part of this “flattening” of Lofi Girl’s vibe was in response to enormous growth during the pandemic, and the need more people felt for background noise to fill the void left from not being around as many people. Music filled that gap, as did other white noise services. But, unlike some other pandemic trends, having ambient music run in the background has stuck around.

Perhaps it offers a distinctive benefit - 404 highlight a study that showed students who listened to “lofi music as background to studying scored higher on a test than those studying in silence.”

So perhaps we’re looking at Lofi Girl and the overall trend of “flat” sounding tracks through the wrong lens. Rather than the flatness coming from the edges having been sawn off, the flatness is a feature. We’ve been through periods like this in the past - “dinner party music” was a thing in the nineties, with acid jazz and trip hop among those genres chucked into a bucket of alleged blandness. Dido sold a shedload of records through ostensibly being highly Magic FM in her output - enough going on to keep mums and dads occupied, not too much to be distracting.

The discussion addresses a broader concern that culture is flattening. Anything that happens in the world, whether it’s a major news story or a hit TV show, gets almost instantaneously flattened into content in our pursuit of the discourse, in the insatiable need of the creator economy to have stories to react to.

This flattening puts the news on the same level as what’s in the charts and what’s on Netflix. The mass reactions put everything in the same bucket, stripping out uniqueness, sanding off edges, and potentially shifting focus away from what’s truly important.

When one of my favourite pieces about internet culture was published back in 2018, this wasn’t how we imagined the Big Flat Now. The flatness should have democratised access to creativity, enabling us to endlessly remix that which came before to endlessly create new, more exciting output. The economic incentives may offer some reward to such original remixing, but there’s just as much reward from copies of copies, the hot-takes and reactions to the originality.

But we need to be careful, particularly when it comes to looking at audience behaviour, not to be distracted by prevailing narratives and ignore the trends happening in front of us. Lofi beats to relax to, K-Pop Demon Hunters - these genuinely resonate with people. A crucial part of the planning process is understanding what makes a trend stick, and what that MEANS for comms.

We very rarely get to design campaigns for ourselves or for people like us - we don’t represent those mythical “stakeholders” or the general public. Facebook is still the most statistically popular social platform in the UK. Broadcast news is still a mainstay in many people’s lives. Just because we don’t vibe with something doesn’t mean we can dismiss it out of hand.

And while we might see a trend for flattening current events into “content”, much of which is meaningless, it doesn’t mean that everything flat is necessarily a failure. Sometimes it’s the point. What looks bland or uninspired from one perspective can be exactly what another audience needs in that moment—background focus, shared community, or a vibe that marks their own endless summers. For those of us working in comms, the lesson is clear: resist the temptation to dismiss what doesn’t resonate personally. Instead, lean into understanding why it lands with others. Because in a flattened culture, the edges worth paying attention to aren’t always the ones we expect.