Take Dominic Fike, who recently scored his first Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. The song? "Babydoll", released in 2018. Eight years after appearing on his debut EP, Don't Forget About Me, Demos (2018), the track found a new audience online, made its way onto the radio, and eventually climbed to No. 10.
And this is hardly an isolated incident. Thanks to music-driven social platforms like TikTok, songs are finding success years, sometimes even decades, after their initial release. In 2023, Taylor Swift’s "Cruel Summer" topped the Hot 100 four years after its release. That same year, Miguel’s "Sure Thing" reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart, more than a decade after its original run. Even Fleetwood Mac’s "Dreams", released back in 1977, found itself back on the Hot 100 in 2020, all because a guy decided to go skateboarding with a bottle of cranberry juice and then post a video of it on TikTok.
On TikTok, trends are born, beaten to death, and forgotten in the span of a week. And yet, for an app that can barely remember what it was obsessed with last Tuesday, it has a sneaky soft spot for the past. An album deep cut can spend years collecting dust until someone uses 15 seconds of it in a video, and suddenly everyone wants to hear the rest.
Sometimes, the reason for its sudden popularity barely makes sense. Lady Gaga’s "Bloody Mary", for instance, became practically synonymous with "Wednesday" in 2022 when fans started pairing it with Jenna Ortega's now-iconic dance scene. The song wasn’t actually in the scene, or anywhere else in the show, but that didn’t stop it from making its Hot 100 debut more than a decade after its release.
Of course, movies, TV shows, and radio have given music a second life for decades. But where record labels and radio stations once had an outsized say in which forgotten gems got another chance, now just about anyone can play tastemaker. You don’t need a record deal, a radio show, or even particularly good taste — just a song you like and a few people willing to listen. And if the algorithm cooperates, those few people might turn into a few million.
While the internet certainly loves a good nostalgia trip, the most exciting thing about these musical revivals is that, for plenty of listeners, nostalgia has nothing to do with it. These aren’t old favorites they’re revisiting. They’re brand-new discoveries. Someone hearing "Babydoll" for the first time in 2026 couldn’t care less that it came out in 2018. It’s new to them, and that’s all that really matters.
And honestly? What a refreshing change of pace from the usual cycle of hype, overexposure, and collective amnesia. We’re so accustomed to treating every new thing like it’s going to turn into a pumpkin when the clock strikes twelve. We rush to participate and form an opinion, and then we move on before the next thing drops. But art deserves better than the same blink-and-you’ll-miss-it treatment we give everything else. For all the ways social media encourages us to keep up, keep scrolling, and keep searching for something new, it’s nice to see it remind us that there’s so much to love about what we’ve left behind.
