TikTok's power of resurrection: How the app creates new hits from old songs

Once widely dismissed as a silly app where teens share dance videos, TikTok has emerged in recent years as a preeminent tastemaker and cultural compass, especially for the music industry. It has the power to push a two-year-old song to the top of the charts, build hype for a record-breaking album, and even catapult a previously obscure artist to the Grammys.

But this effect is not reserved for new artists and 21st-century superstars. Songs released more than 20 years ago — before many TikTok users were born — have been effectively resurrected when they grab the app's attention.

Whether it's a hip-shaker primed for choreography, a pleasant soundtrack for montages, or a niche hit that highlights an algorithmic quirk, creators employ a variety of methods to breathe new life into decades-old tracks.

To dive deeper into what makes older songs TikTok-certified to stand the test of time, Insider analyzed Chartmetric data for the weekly top trending 50 sounds used on TikTok for 80 weeks — from June 6, 2021, to October 15, 2022.

Our criteria for inclusion in our database were that each song had to be originally released before 2003 and had to have trended on TikTok's weekly top-50 chart over the 80-week period that we analyzed. We did not include any remixes or covers of songs that were released after 2003. We also did not include any holiday songs, as seasonal trends could skew the data.

While it's not always clear how or why a song resurfaces, we found that anything from a 1932 children's song to an 1984 pop hit have the ability to go viral on the platform.