Music and Meme Culture: Why Songs Become Memes

Music's role in shaping memes.

The internet has long since become more than just a source of information — it's also a space where a new culture takes shape. Memes, in particular, have become one form of that culture — evolving from simple image-with-text formats into full videos, trends, and even songs that now take on new meaning on social media.

The DeTalks team looked into why certain songs become memes, and which tracks are already part of internet history.

How Songs Become Memes

There's no clear formula that guarantees a song will become a meme. The reasons songs spread for comedic purposes are so random that trying to pin them down is a lost cause. Often, even the performers themselves don't understand why their songs get turned into internet jokes.

Jack Glass of the duo Bag Raiders has described it as crazy, saying that everything's great and there's nothing to complain about, but that at the same time, it just feels like pure luck, since the internet works in a way where things like this simply can't be predicted — it just does its own thing, shares Jack Glass of the duo Bag Raiders.

At the same time, many meme songs do share common traits.

• Memorability: the melody or chorus sticks in the listener's mind for a long time.

• Visual pairing: music videos, or clips from films or shows that pair easily with the music, help it spread virally.

• A distinctive 'drop': a sudden shift in rhythm or instrumentation lends itself well to building unexpected, comedic videos.

• The nostalgia effect: many meme tracks come from past decades, and using them evokes pleasant memories for listeners.

• Ironic sound: audiences enjoy tracks as a joke — and that, too, is a form of appreciation.

Meme Songs and Their History

It's hard to pin down exactly when songs started being used to make memes, but as early as the 2000s, music was gradually becoming part of internet jokes that spread quickly online. Here are a few examples of tracks that became favorites among Reddit users.

The dance-pop single by Rick Astley was released back in 1987 and quickly became a number-one hit on several international charts, including the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart. The song gained meme status in 2007, when a post appeared on the forum 4chan promising a trailer for the game GTA 4, but instead 'tricking' users with a clip of Rick Astley.

This form of trolling quickly became viral: a song would be hidden behind the guise of important or interesting information, triggering surprise, laughter, and sometimes disappointment. The singer himself responded positively to the memes, since they gave his hit a second life in the digital age.

The track 'Shooting Stars' by Australian duo Bag Raiders came out back in 2009, but really started spreading in 2017, when it became the basis for a series of video memes. In these videos, a character (a person or an animal) would fall or 'fly' out of frame, then get transported into outer space as the track's rhythmic chorus played. The song's electronic sound worked well for surreal, somewhat psychedelic edits.

A song became an internet meme in the mid-2000s and gained particular popularity in 2013-2014. The joke was to respond to any question about a song's title — regardless of the real answer — with: 'Darude – Sandstorm.' This quickly became a universal form of trolling in video comments, especially on YouTube and Twitch.

TikTok and a New Era of Memes

As the social media platform TikTok grew in popularity, meme culture evolved along with it. Where memes used to mostly be built around images or video, TikTok shifted the emphasis — now music plays the leading role.

Content like this is usually built around a shortened song clip, 5 to 15 seconds long. Users then add acting elements or witty text over the video.

TikTok memes became the first mainstream memes defined specifically by music. If images set the format for visual memes, and actions define video memes, musical memes stand out for how the footage syncs with a particular melody.

Why People Like Meme Songs

Like any other form of humorous content, meme songs are one of the ways people communicate online. They let you express something hard to put into words quickly and concisely, and also foster a sense of connection and understanding with others.

When someone recognizes a melody from a trend, or uses it in an ironic context, they're communicating with others who are also 'in the know.' This creates an 'inner circle,' in which meme songs serve as a shared code for communication.

Beyond this, music memes also help people express their own emotions: they become a way to say 'this is about me' without extra words. Anxiety, shame, awkwardness — conveying emotions or experiences like these through a song is one of the factors drawing young people to content like this.

In a world where something can go viral within hours, meme songs reflect not just audience taste, but how music is perceived today. Internet jokes are born spontaneously — and although memes might seem fleeting, their influence carries through the years of web culture.