As we head into the final weeks of 2024, everyone and every platform is looking back while forging ahead. I love a good trend report and I’m a sucker for a “year in review.” I’m taking notes as we build out our forecasts for 2025.
Next week, we’ll drop our Beats + Bytes 2024 trends and review with our friends at Adweek. I see this community of newsletter writers and thought-leading voices as the modern-day mixtape artists, curating cultural themes and adlibbing our POVs. I’m as excited to hear your thoughts as I am to share my own.
The biggest recap these days is definitively Spotify Wrapped. If you want to understand somebody, look at their listening habits (real data!) and not what they purport to represent on social media. SNL nailed it this week until they took it too far (a common mistake for this 50th season, but I digress).
Do you remember when you didn’t share your data? Now we put it on blast with Spotify Wrapped. This is a paradigm shift into a bizzaro world I never thought would exist. What’s next, a wrapped of your Google search analytics? Your top Uber Eats? Most viewed-but-not-purchased Amazon items? How ‘bout an Oura ring year in review? This is who we’ve become.
In this era of great, post-Covid, AI boom transformation, the creator economy has us all wanting to show off our uniqueness. Your POV is your highest leverage point and authenticity is the highest human gravitational frequency.
Spotify set the tone by making their Wrapped a point of understanding, individualism, and self-expression. And then, in true Spotify fashion, they made it the biggest thing in culture with their top-rate marketing.
And if you want to go deeper and understand your data more, you can do so with these cool ancillary sites.
Of course, other music platforms have followed the leader, including Amazon Music, YouTube, Apple (with Replay), and Snap. Spotify even broadened its year-end scope to include podcast insights. This is valuable stuff for understanding the micro- and macro-cultural marketing environments.
But like it or not, the platform of the year is unquestionably TikTok. Not only is this the place to break trends, it’s also the place for search and discovery. Their music recap laid down the hammer: 13 of this year’s 16 biggest hits on the U.S. charts are linked to TikTok trends. And I’m willing to bet that’s the same for search, restaurants, hotels, and news stories. TikTok is this generation’s MTV, full stop. It’s where culture lives.
It’s wild to think that on January 19th, the day before the Trump Administration takes office, TikTok’s U.S. fate will be determined. Taking TikTok off the table would completely change the cultural landscape and cause another major paradigm shift. But that’s a vertical video for another day…