The Tumblr music deep dive
Exploring the most popular artists of the Tumblr era
This is my second piece in a row about Tumblr, but fear not, we’re back on familiar ground: music. Recently, I stumbled upon Tumblr’s annual Year in Review series, which I somehow missed during my Tumblr years even though they’ve been doing it since 2013. I’m not sure if they didn’t promote it very well back then or if I saw it but just didn’t care.
Naturally, I gravitated towards the music charts, which were quite illuminating. Having spent a lot of time on Tumblr in the early 2010s, I have a pretty specific idea in my mind of what “Tumblr music” is — indie pop and alternative rock artists like Lana Del Rey, Marina and the Diamonds, Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, and Halsey — and a brief survey of articles, Reddit threads, TikToks and Spotify playlists reminiscing about the Tumblr era confirmed that, yes, that’s what everyone thinks of as Tumblr music. But Tumblr’s year-end music charts paint a different picture, and I want to explore why that is.
I’ll start by defining the Tumblr era. I certainly could analyse every Year in Review from 2013 to 2023, but Tumblr’s golden age came pretty early in that timespan. 2014 is widely considered the site’s definitive year, and for good reason, with daily activity peaking in early 2014 and beginning to fall after that. While a ban on explicit content in 2018 alienated many users1 and is widely credited with the site’s downturn, Tumblr’s popularity had actually been in decline for years by that point.
From the graph above, we can see Tumblr’s peak era lasting from 2012 to 2016, which feels right to me. Unfortunately, Tumblr didn’t do a Year in Review for 2012, so we’ll never know if “How Bad Can I Be?” was the biggest song of that year. (If you know, you know.)
So I’m going to be looking at Tumblr’s music charts from 2013 to 2016, specifically the “top solo artists” and “top bands and groups” lists from those years. Tumblr also listed the top albums and songs for a few years,2 and in 2014 they went all out and made tags for top lyric and music video posts too, but other than the Frozen soundtrack having quite a presence on the 2014 songs list, they’re pretty much exactly what you’d expect if you’ve seen the artist lists.
Tumblr also made yearly lists of the most popular K-pop groups, but I’m not going cover those because you can’t really say much about the relative popularity of Korean artists on Tumblr when they’re on a separate list and you can’t see how they compare to western artists year by year. I would guess that K-pop’s popularity on Tumblr increased over the years, like it did outside of Tumblr, but I don’t have much specific evidence for that besides the introduction of a top K-pop group members list in 2017, suggesting that the genre was by then popular enough to warrant two lists.
Anyway, I’ve combined the top 20 solo artists and top 20 bands of every year from 2013 to 2016 into a single chart, where I have colour-coded artists based on three categories, which I will explain in more detail. In 2013, Tumblr included 25 artists on both lists, but I cut the bottom five to make it symmetrical.3 Also, there’s one small mistake on the 2013 and 2014 lists, specifically that Marina and the Diamonds appears on the bands list, when she was actually a solo artist who went by a band-like stage name.4 Tumblr eventually realised this mistake and put her on the solo list in 2015.
The green category is popular music, mostly contemporary pop singers, rappers, boy bands and girl groups who were current hitmakers during the Tumblr era, but also a few older artists who are among the most popular music acts of all time. This category makes up just over half of the chart entries during these years, and an overwhelming 80% majority of solo artists.
The red category is bands that fall into certain subgenres, mostly pop punk, emo and metalcore. This category makes up just over a quarter of Tumblr chart entries, and just under half of all entries on the bands lists.
The blue category is the alternative category, and consists of alternative pop, rock, rap and R&B artists. Many of these artists had major chart hits and could just as easily be classed as pop, but again, this is all based on why these artists were popular on Tumblr rather than on any objective genre classification. This category is the smallest one, making up 20% of the Tumblr charts, with a fairly even split between solo artists and bands.
Having established the three categories that Tumblr’s most popular artists fall into, I’m going to explain why these types of music were popular on the platform, and why artists in the popular and pop punk/emo categories aren’t widely considered “Tumblr music” despite collectively making up a majority of the site’s favourite artists.
I. Pop
On the surface, the popular music category is the simplest one to explain. Popular music… is popular. Most people know it, and many people like it. Pop music was popular on Tumblr because it was popular everywhere. Case closed.
But if you dig a little deeper, the most popular pop artists on Tumblr tell a more interesting story about the site’s userbase. For one thing, you may have noticed (especially because I went and highlighted them a darker shade of green) that many of Tumblr’s favourite pop artists were teen-oriented acts — boy bands,5 girl groups,6 and singers who became popstars in their teens,7 many of them via kids’ shows on Disney8 or Nickelodeon.9 This makes a lot of sense given that a large proportion of Tumblr users were teenagers and young adults.10 According to a 2013 GlobalWebIndex survey, “46% of Tumblr’s active user base at a global level is between the ages of 16 and 24. This compares to roughly 30% for Google+,11 27% for Facebook, and 29% for Twitter.” (The survey didn’t track the number of users aged under 16, but that demographic had to have made up a significant portion of the site’s users as well.)
Today, Tumblr is best remembered for a few specific things: fandoms, certain aesthetics, and a particular brand of online activism. But before that reputation solidified, Tumblr was just another relatively new social network that any young person, even if they weren’t especially nerdy or edgy or woke, might consider joining. If you look at Tumblr’s most popular posts,12 you’ll find that most of them were either funny or relatable content that could have been popular on Reddit or Twitter, or pretty pictures that would have done numbers on Instagram or Pinterest. I found this one decently popular post from 2012 that lists “Tumblr things”, and they’re all just very standard early 2010s teen interests, some skewing more towards teenage girls. And there’s no better example of normal teenage girls with normal teenage girl interests on Tumblr than justgirlythings, a popular Tumblr blog13 that posted aesthetically pleasing image macros of user-submitted “girly things”. Some justgirlythings submissions were stereotypically girly things, while others were things that anyone could relate to, but often paired with “girly” pictures.
An archived snapshot of justgirlythings’ music tag in 2013 is a pretty good encapsulation of Tumblr’s music taste at the time. There are a few posts about rock bands like Fall Out Boy, The Pretty Reckless and Foster the People, but it’s mostly pop music, and within that, mostly teen pop, which was of course aimed squarely at teen girls. And, of course, we can’t ignore that justgirlythings had an entire featured tag for One Direction — no wonder they were the most popular band on Tumblr that year.
Even though mainstream pop acts were consistently the most popular artists on Tumblr, their widespread popularity outside of Tumblr meant that they aren’t widely identified with the site, and their music isn’t generally considered “Tumblr music”. There are some exceptions — Taylor Swift has been identified as a Tumblr artist in some retrospectives, as well as by The 1975’s Matty Healy, for obvious reasons. But overall, excluding pop artists from the Tumblr music canon makes sense. I certainly saw my fair share of posts about popular musicians like Taylor Swift, One Direction and Nicki Minaj on Tumblr, but I didn’t discover a single artist in this category via Tumblr, so I don’t consider them specific to the platform.
II. Bands
There are so many old posts and blogs from the early days of Tumblr about “bands”, a seemingly vague term that could be used to refer to literally any music group, but in practice was almost always applied to pop punk, emo, metalcore and other adjacent genres. This categorisaton is based more on these acts’ audience than their sound — I definitely wouldn’t call late-period Panic! at the Disco or My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way’s solo career pop punk or emo, but their earlier work and the audience it earned them absolutely qualify them for this category. And while there are a few reasons that I haven’t included 5 Seconds of Summer, who technically fit the genre requirement,14 or Twenty One Pilots, who have significant fanbase overlap with at least some of these bands,15 the main one is just that they broke through too late to count. Green Day do count despite debuting much earlier than the rest of the bands, as they’re included on a number of “bands” posts.16
Anyway, I’ve colour-coded the bands (and one band member gone solo) that fall into these genres in red, with the successful hitmakers17 highlighted a darker shade. I was super into some of these bands in my early teens, but I apparently had pretty basic taste because the bands I liked are all the popular ones.18
You’ll notice that in the very first year in review, the most popular bands in this category weren’t the pop hitmakers — I for one was pretty surprised to learn that in 2013, the year that Fall Out Boy, arguably the most commercially successful band of this whole scene, returned from their hiatus and released their first album in five years, they were less popular on Tumblr than Pierce the Veil, All Time Low, and Bring Me the Horizon. But over the years, the popularity of all but the most successful bands declined, with only the biggest acts sticking around into the late 2010s.
For the rest of this scene, I think that 2013 actually marked the beginning of the end. Most of the posts and blogs I’ve been able to find about these bands are pretty old — most around 2012 and 2013, but some as early as 2009. The reason that fans of these bands had such a major presence on Tumblr so early in the site’s history is because these bands already had large online followings that they’d built up on MySpace, which was instrumental to the success of many of these bands. MySpace fame was still helping to launch artists as late as 2010, but the site’s popularity was in decline. Though most users who jumped ship moved to Facebook, a lot of people who were on MySpace to follow and talk about their favourite bands moved to Tumblr,19 whose early userbase and culture were very much the product of the pre-Tumblr internet.20
The reason these groups aren’t really considered “Tumblr music” is two-fold: one, being so intrinsically linked to MySpace sets them apart from the Tumblr era in our cultural memory, and two, their popularity on Tumblr peaked too early to be part of the mid-2010s Tumblr era. The bands who retained significant followings on Tumblr past the early 2010s were by far the most popular groups in this category, and thus the most accessible to younger fans who weren’t around for the MySpace (or even early Tumblr) years.21 This is especially true of Fall Out Boy, Paramore and Panic! at the Disco, who were still scoring major chart hits in the mid-2010s — Fall Out Boy’s “Centuries” and Paramore’s “Ain’t It Fun” were both top 10 hits in 2014,22 and while the Panic!’s big comeback wouldn’t reach its height until the end of the decade, “Hallelujah” was a top 40 hit in 2015.23 As as result, these groups were still relevant to teenagers in the mid-2010s and had strong fan followings on Tumblr,24 but even so, they’re mostly remembered as a product of the 2000s MySpace era.
III. Alternative
At last, we’ve arrived at the artists who actually are widely thought of as Tumblr music — at least, some of them. I’ve highlighted the artists most commonly brought up in other Tumblr retrospectives in a darker shade of blue, and we can see that the artists most commonly identified as Tumblr artists were in fact the most popular alternative acts on the platform. Not every quintessential Tumblr artist makes the cut — though The Neighbourhood are almost always included in the 2014 Tumblr canon, they only debuted on Tumblr’s year in review in 2017, and oft-cited artists like Sky Ferreira never made the lists.
Still, all of the biggest names are represented, most of them pretty high on the charts. And what do they have in common? Despite all falling under the broadly-applied labels of alternative pop25 or alternative rock,26 what unites them is less their sound but their place in the culture. They were alternative in the same way as Fall Out Boy in the 2000s or Nirvana in the ’90s, which is to say that they were very popular artists who nonetheless stood apart from the pop mainstream. Some of them were major hitmakers whose songs you would hear on the radio and whose videos you might see on whatever TV channels still played music videos in the mid-2010s, and the rest were popular enough that you could count on your local music retailer to stock their CD and at least some kids at your high school27 to have heard of them, but they didn’t sound like the mainstream pop of the early 2010s, an era of upbeat party music by Katy Perry and Ke$ha and Flo Rida.28
A 2013 Buzzfeed article by Matthew Perpetua discusses Lorde29 in this context, exploring how she “consistently positions herself as an outsider” who “[feels] distanced from the popular kids, alienated by the conspicuous consumption of pop stars, and marginalized by coming from a place ‘you’ll never see on screen.’”30 That these artists were simultaneously cool outsiders and accessible and popular made them perfect for Tumblr, a site full of awkward, misunderstood, chronically online teens and young adults who sought to build an identity around their interests. It’s no coincidence that 2010s alternative pop and 2000s pop punk and emo were both popular on the platform; despite pronounced differences in sound, the two kinds of music filled a similar niche for different (or, in some cases, the same) people.
But it wasn’t just the sound of their music that endeared these artists to Tumblr. This was a primarily image-based platform — users could share text, audio and video posts too, but image posts were definitely the most popular and widely-reblogged type of Tumblr post. Even music-focused Tumblr blogs tended to post more way image posts, including photographs of the artist, gifs from music videos, graphics incorporating song lyrics, than audio posts of songs. This meant that the artists most likely to go viral on Tumblr were those with memorable aesthetics.
Most of the biggest Tumblr-popular artists had either a distinctive look, such as Lana’s retro glamour, Halsey’s blue hair, or Marina’s heart on her cheek (but never on her sleeve), or an instantly recognisable logo, like the AM wave or The Neighbourhood’s upside down house. I must confess, I definitely reblogged some aesthetic edits of the letter X without realising it was logo of indie band The xx, so clearly having a viral logo didn’t necessarily translate into the music going viral too. But when it came to Tumblr’s most popular artists, distinctive visuals were definitely a factor in their popularity — in a Medium post about the Tumblr era, Cassidy Solazzo writes that “I don’t think it was possible for me to go five reblogs without including something The 1975 related […] and I’m convinced their stage lighting going viral on Tumblr is what made them famous”. Looking at the photograph she included in that post, I’m also convinced that was a factor!
Gifs and screenshots from music videos were a common sight on Tumblr, and favoured bands with aesthetically pleasing music videos, such as The 1975. This screenshot from their “Robbers” music video has over a million notes, which is huge for a Tumblr post, and at one point Spotify used that exact same still as the cover art for their official Tumblr-themed “reblog” playlist.31
Lyric edits were also very popular — people would share their favourite song lyrics in all kinds of ways, but there was one especially common trend of white all-caps bold italics Arial text over an image that I constantly saw on Tumblr. Lyrics about longing, love, loss, heartbreak, isolation, alienation and feeling different from others were particularly popular, as many Tumblr users were young people experiencing these feelings for the first time, so artists who sang about these themes were often quoted in viral Tumblr posts. Usually this was contemporary pop/rock/alternative artists, but a line from any kind of music could get a lot of notes if it resonated.
Many of these looks, logos, and lyric edits fell into the popular “soft grunge” aesthetic, along with Doc Martens, plaid skirts, cigarettes, and pastel or monochrome colour schemes. The fun thing about dipping into aesthetics and subcultures on Tumblr was that you didn’t have to own or wear or do all this stuff in real life to participate; if you reblogged the pictures, you were part of it. This was useful for the site’s mostly high school and college-aged userbase, many of whom may not have been able to afford all of the clothes, shoes, and accessories that they posted on their blog. There were many other aesthetics on Tumblr besides just soft grunge,32 and unless you obsessively curated your dashboard, you’d likely see a variety of aesthetics, fandoms, memes, jokes, and music — I saw a little bit of everything that I’ve mentioned here and so much more — but being part of this aesthetic, which is often thought of as the Tumblr aesthetic, is a big part of why these artists are the definition of “Tumblr music”.
There was a lot of variety in the artists who became part of the Tumblr music canon — Marina & the Diamonds and Arctic Monkeys, for example, don’t sound anything alike, and if you weren’t on Tumblr you probably wouldn’t expect there to be much overlap in their fanbases — but it was pretty much exclusively alt-rock and alt-pop acts, which is why alternative hip hop and R&B artists like Frank Ocean, The Weeknd and Tyler, the Creator often go unmentioned in Tumblr retrospectives. They were popular on Tumblr, but it was outside of this very specific context. These artists also appear lower on the year in review lists than the soft-grunge-adjacent artists, and often only for one or two years rather than across the entire 2013-16 era. The same is true of later alt-rock entries like PVRIS, The Front Bottoms and Bastille, who appear near the bottom of the 2015 and 2016 lists and don’t get any mention in Tumblr music write-ups. And there’s no better evidence that the Tumblr moment had passed by 2017 than the fact that Gorillaz shot to the top of the bands list that year, stayed in first place in 2018, and remained in the top 10 for several more years, but are mentioned in exactly zero Tumblr music retrospectives.33
Outside of the official canon, there was a lot more to Tumblr music than just the big names. I checked out a bunch of Tumblr-themed playlists on Spotify, and even limiting myself to ones that included at least some songs by the widely agreed upon Tumblr artists, there was a huge range of music that popped up on multiple playlists,34 less “Tumblr music” and more “all of indie rock and indie pop from 2008-2016”. I noticed something similar on TikTok — there are just enough super obvious Tumblr artists to list in one video, but beyond that you end up in “everything indie” territory.
That makes sense! Tumblr was a huge, sprawling website with no centralised music community, and it’s only natural that users who liked the Tumblr artists would branch out and explore indie and alternative music beyond just those artists.
Then there are acts described as Tumblr artists by some music writers who never appear in these playlists or TikToks, like Taylor Swift, whose status as a sometimes in, sometimes out Tumblr artist I covered above, and Carly Rae Jepsen, cited in a Rolling Stone article that also mentions Swift. Danielle Chelosky wrote a Tumblr music retrospective in which she identifies Citizen as a Tumblr band, but I’d never seen them mentioned on Tumblr and haven’t come across them in any other Tumblr nostalgia content. But if you saw enough posts about an artist on Tumblr, and especially if that was where you discovered them, then they were a Tumblr artist, at least to you. I’ve always thought of FEMM, a Japanese electronic pop duo who I discovered on Tumblr and remember seeing a bunch of popular posts about,35 as a quintessential 2014 Tumblr group, but in the wider world of Tumblr music, they were actually very niche, and I haven’t seen them mentioned in any of my Tumblr research.36
IV. After the Tumblr era
Tumblr music has two afterlives, one on Tumblr, where the most popular artists have gone in some pretty unexpected directions, and one off-site, where it’s a source of nostalgia for many former Tumblr users.
On Tumblr, the post-peak year in review lists37 are a combination of unexpected and entirely expected artists. There are a few groups I straight up hadn’t heard of,38 plus a surprising number of classic rock bands and modern imitators. I can guess the reason for some of these bands’ popularity — Queen and Mötley Crüe both had biopics in 2019, and the appearance of three out of four Beatles on the 2022 solo artist list39 follows the December 2021 release of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, and maybe those things inspired Tumblr users to explore classic rock more generally, but it still seems kind of off-brand to me. I’m especially intrigued by the sudden popularity of faux classic rock bands like Greta Van Fleet and Måneskin. The 2014 equivalent of those bands would be, what, The Struts? Post-comeback The Darkness? Those bands definitely weren’t big on Tumblr, and I’m honestly pretty curious as to where the audience for this type of music came from.
There are also some pretty predictable entries. Since 2015, the top solo artist has gone back and forth between Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, with the other almost always in second place. Pop largely dominates the solo lists, and the appearance of indie artists like Hayley Kiyoko, Hozier and Mitski is entirely on-brand for Tumblr’s taste as I knew it. Old Tumblr favourites like Lana Del Rey, Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, Halsey, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, Paramore, 5 Seconds of Summer and various members of One Direction stuck around for a long time. As I previously covered, My Chemical Romance have recently become the most popular band on Tumblr, and when the different artist lists were finally combined in 2023, K-pop was well-represented, with BTS ranked second only to Taylor Swift. There are some artists who I’m surprised aren’t bigger on Tumblr,40 but I’m totally out of touch with the Tumblr community now, so what do I know?
Elsewhere, Tumblr music represents a very specific moment in time. In recent years, there’s been a lot of nostalgia for the 2014 Tumblr era from twenty-somethings who lived through it and teenagers who wish they did. Some of this is pure romanticisation based mostly around music and fashion and reliving one’s lost youth — I lived through that era and it wasn’t that great, and Tumblr in particular was more fun and less toxic in 2011-12 than it was in 2014 — but there are some legitimate reasons to miss those years. A pretty insightful comment on a Reddit thread about teenagers romanticising 2014 points out that with TikTok becoming the most popular social network, today’s young people don’t have much in the way of text-based social media with customisable profiles, and having to show your face on camera in order to fully participate in the TikTok community is a huge barrier for a lot of people — and a potentially regrettable decision for those who do it. That alone makes me very grateful that I was a teenager 10-15 years ago instead of today.
Having dived pretty deep into Tumblr music, I can’t say that I’m that surprised by the variety of genres and artists that were most popular during the site’s peak, even if they’re not always remembered as such. Some things threw me off a little at first, but once I started to think about it, the popularity of pop and emo made perfect sense, as did the fact that they aren’t really remembered when we think of Tumblr music. As you can probably tell, I’m a huge music person, and when I was on Tumblr, I had a policy of listening to every song that anyone I followed reblogged, and if I couldn’t listen right away I’d save the post to my drafts for later. As a result, I discovered a huge number of songs and artists via the platform, which naturally included Lana, Marina, and The 1975, but also some stuff that was totally unrelated to what people think of as “Tumblr music” — indie folk, classic rock, J-pop, K-pop, fanmade mashups, weird meme songs, rare Taylor Swift deep cuts, and more. I think that’s the true Tumblr experience, for music and for everything else — a pretty random mix of things from users you followed for one thing and kept following after they started posting other things. It was fun while it lasted (well, some of the time), and I took the music with me when I left.
The real worst change that Tumblr made during its peak years was when they changed the image dimensions, which made many image posts and pretty much all gifsets made before October 2014 look stretched and terrible on the dashboard. Since it was pretty common on Tumblr for older posts to continue gaining notes long after they were posted — it wasn’t weird to reblog a years-old Tumblr post the way liking a years-old tweet or Instagram photo would be — that really screwed over artists, gifmakers, and anyone who enjoyed their work, and it pissed me off way more than the NSFW ban ever did.
Perhaps that kind of confusion is why she changed her stage name to Marina in 2017.
One Direction, The Wanted.
Fifth Harmony, Little Mix.
Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes.
Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato.
Ariana Grande.
Tumblr officially prohibited users under 13 from joining the site, but there was no way to verify a user’s age, and there were definitely some preteen Tumblr users.
The fact that Google+ was even included in this survey is such an early 2010s throwback.
Not to be confused with Tumblr’s most popular post, which I’ve previously written about:
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At its peak, justgirlythings had over 600,000 followers.
What sets them apart is not that they were on the poppier end of the pop punk spectrum or that they eventually went full pop — both of those things are true of Panic! at the Disco — but because they got their big break as One Direction’s opening act and their audience had way more overlap with 1D fans than with Fall Out Boy fans.
While Twenty One Pilots aren’t pop punk or even really rock, they’re on the same record label as several big names in the genre and as such have a lot of listeners in common, and some fans consider them a fourth member of the so called “Emo Trinity” alongside Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and My Chemical Romance, though this is definitely not universally accepted.
Plus I was an emo teen myself at the turn of the decade, and I can personally attest that it was extremely common for fans of Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance to be super into Green Day too. I certainly was.
The divide between the bands with and without major pop hits is pretty stark — the more popular bands all had at least one top 10 hit and at least two top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, while almost all of the other bands never charted on the Hot 100 at all. The only band that falls in the middle is All Time Low, who had two Hot 100 hits that fell outside of the top 40, though the latter of those hits is from 2020 and not really relevant to this time period.
As big a fan as I was of Green Day, My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy when I joined Tumblr in 2011, I never really engaged with the fandoms for those bands, partly because I had enough friends (both at school and in my pre-Tumblr circle of internet friends) who liked those groups that I didn’t need Tumblr to find people to fangirl over them with, and partly because real person shipping and slash fiction was hard to avoid in early 2010s band fandoms, and I always found that kinda creepy and invasive.
Tumblr also gained a lot of users from LiveJournal, another 2000s fandom hub that was in decline by the early 2010s.
A great example of this is the popularity of rage comics on Tumblr in 2010, which really seem like a relic of a bygone era.
Green Day, who dropped off the band lists after 2013, have also seen a resurgence on Tumblr, but given that most of the more recent pop punk and emo nostalgia posts I’ve come across seem to revolve around the Emo Trinity and sometimes Paramore, I’m not totally sure if they’re still grouped with the other bands the way they were back in the 2000s.
Shockingly, “Ain’t It Fun” was actually Paramore’s first and so far only top 10 hit.
A not especially relevant but kind of interesting detail: all three of these artists have since collaborated with Taylor Swift.
Lana Del Rey, Marina and the Diamonds, Lorde, Halsey, Troye Sivan, Melanie Martinez.
Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, Twenty One Pilots.
You can substitute “middle school” or “college” depending on your age at the time.
Well, apart from Marina and the Diamonds, whose Electra Heart album was bubblegum in sound but pure Tumblr alternative in its lyrics.
The breakthrough artist of the 2010s alternative pop wave. Lana Del Rey actually had her first hit* before Lorde, but it took a club-friendly remix to get “Summertime Sadness” into the top 10, whereas “Royals” made it all the way to #1 in its original form. Honestly, my criteria for sorting an artist into the incredibly nebulous “alternative” bucket is whether they had any major pop hits** before “Royals” brought alt-pop into the mainstream. So if you’re wondering why technically-alternative-rock Coldplay aren’t in this category while not-wildly-different Bastille are, it’s solely because “Viva La Vida” was a 2008 hit and “Pompeii” was a 2014 hit.
*And biggest hit, if you don’t her barely audible feature on Taylor Swift’s “Snow on the Beach”.
**And by hit, I mean a hit on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, so Arctic Monkeys and Marina still count despite having hits in the UK before 2013.
***Yes, I’m putting footnotes in my footnotes again. I have a lot of thoughts, okay?
I get what she means 100%, but as a New Zealander who constantly see Lorde’s city on screen, I’ve always found that lyric kinda funny.
They’ve since changed it to promote their Spotify Singles series, but maybe one day they’ll change it back.
When Tumblr finally started including aesthetics on their year in review lists in 2020 and 2021, the top aesthetics were cottagecore and dark academia, with other popular aesthetics generally centering around nature and academia as well. That has to be a late 2010s development, because I rarely saw these aesthetics and never saw those particular labels for them on early 2010s Tumblr.
I was still on Tumblr in the late 2010s, but I guess wasn’t really part of the site’s wider community anymore because I had no idea that they were popular!
Passion Pit, Alt-J, Grimes, Milky Chance, Bastille, Tame Impala, Phoenix, Two Door Cinema Club, Vance Joy, Zella Day, Cold War Kids, Oh Wonder, Daughter, Bright Eyes, Modest Mouse, Of Monsters and Men, Birdy, Tove Lo, Echosmith, Jaymes Young, Chase Atlantic, Disclosure, Hayley Kiyoko, Neon Trees, Angus & Julia Stone, Cults, Glass Animals, Bleachers, Bear Hands, Robert DeLong, Peter Bjorn and John, City and Colour, Bad Suns, Joywave, New Politics, Arcade Fire, Foals, Kings of Leon, Lykke Li, Hozier, Bon Iver, Empire of the Sun, Catfish and the Bottlemen, Fitz and the Tantrums, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Cage the Elephant, Foster the People, Walk the Moon, Young the Giant, The Jungle Giants, The xx, The Temper Trap, The Kooks, The Killers, The Strokes, The Black Keys, The Wombats, The Naked and Famous, Charli XCX, M83, MGMT, BØRNS, BROODS, HAIM, LANY, STRFKR, KONGOS, CRUISR, GROUPLOVE.
I managed to find an audio post of their most popular song with 19,000 notes and a gifset with 12,000, which is pretty decent.
Unlike other Japanese and Korean artists whose audience was limited due to the language barrier, all of FEMM’s songs were entirely in English, so they ought to have had more of a shot at wider Tumblr fame.
In 2023, Tumblr combined its solo artists, bands and K-pop lists into a single list, which I didn’t include in the above graphic.
I’m not sure if these are niche Tumblr-specific bands or if I’m just out of touch and everyone has heard of Mystery Skulls and Lovejoy and WayV.
Do I even need to tell you that the one who didn’t make the list is Ringo?
Phoebe Bridgers seems like she should be right up alternative Tumblr’s alley, especially because there seems to be a lot of overlap between her fanbase and Mitski’s, but it took until 2023 for her to appear on Tumblr’s lists — pretty late, given how big a year 2020 was for her.