There’s a very specific kind of disappointment people don’t really talk about and it is the TikTok disappointment. People who love modern music and are chronically online on TikTok, like me, should know the one.
While scrolling, a song finds you, it is soft, haunting and perfectly edited into a 15-second loop that feels almost magical. You like it and your fyp becomes about the song making it linger in your head. So you replay it over and over, already imagining how it’ll sound filling your room while you work, think, or just exist. Now that’s exactly what happened to me with Bye by Ariana Grande although I saw some folks arguing that she’s not the original artist of the song which really isn’t my problem.
Basically, the TikTok version of Bye is beautiful, gentle and almost hypnotic. It carries the kind of sound that soothes you even when it’s about heartbreak. I was sold instantly and yearned to have the full experience. So, naturally, I went to Spotify, ready to put it on repeat and let it carry me through my day.
That’s where I realized I had made a mistake. I shouldn’t have gone looking because full song just didn’t feel the same. It wasn’t bad, most of us know Ariana is still Ariana. Her voice, her delivery, her artistry, none of that is in question. But the feeling I had fallen in love with wasn’t there in the same way.
Now that’s when it clicked that TikTok doesn’t just promote music, it reshapes it. Someone, somewhere, took a fragment of that song, refined it, maybe slowed it down, added a beat, looped the most emotionally potent part and created something almost entirely new. Something more distilled, addictive and oh my days, perfect!
And by the time you go looking for the original, you’re not really searching for the song anymore, you’re searching for that feeling and sometimes, the original just can’t compete with the version you met first.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened to me. And I know I can’t be the only one. There’s this gap between TikTok edits and actual songs that no one really preps you for. It’s almost unfair, in a way. Artists create full, layered pieces of work, but we fall in love with 15 seconds of it. lol. 15 seconds that may have been altered just enough to become something else entirely so when we finally hear the whole thing, it feels underwhelming. Prolly not because it is underwhelming, but because we were introduced to a curated illusion.
TikTok gives us the highlight before the story and sometimes, that highlight is all I really wanted.
