Abstract

Since September 2023 Billboard has been working with ByteDance’s global short video platform to determine the »TikTok Billboard Top 50« on a weekly basis. This new chart from the established entertainment magazine presents the current music trends on the platform, which has grown rapidly in recent times, based on video productions, views and other measurable user engagement. This ranking not only shows a change in the music industry, which is experiencing a surge in popularization through the appropriation and mashup practices of social media users. It also shows how ›second-order popularization‹ and thus the production of the popular based on rankings and charts is changingunder the conditions of digitallynetworkedplatforms. The following article examines the extent to which the influence of meme practices on the metrics of popularization reveals a new way of asserting popularity, for which, in addition to the quantifiable attention of the many, the inherent dynamics of practices are decisive. In a first step, the relationship between pop music and TikTok is analyzed. Secondly, there is a case study of a TikTok dance trend that emerges from pop cultural transfers from the Netflix series Wednesday and brings a sped-up version of the song »Bloody Mary« from2011 into the charts twelve years later. A third section uses further examples to shed light on how rankings on TikTok themselves function as meme templates and in turn produce new practices of evaluating popularity. Returning from the case studies material, a fourth section concludes by reflecting on the new development of observing viral and meme-generating social media songs in the standardized metrics of the popular culture music industry.