Hold My Hand — What TikTok’s UK Song of the Year Really Signals
A Jet2 jingle, a 1962 ballad and a decade-old pop anthem top TikTok’s charts — suggesting a platform increasingly driven by nostalgia, recycled sounds and algorithmic déjà vu.
TikTok has released its annual roundup of the most-used music on the platform, and the results tell us less about 2025’s new music than they do about the way digital culture now loops back on itself. The UK Song of the Year, Jess Glynne’s Hold My Hand (2015), returned not through artistic rediscovery but through a branded holiday trend. The Jet2holidays edits — sped-up boarding passes, poolside transitions, beach panoramas — effectively transformed a mid-2010s pop hit into a soft-focus travel jingle.
It’s a pattern repeated across TikTok’s rankings: the songs dominating the platform this year are overwhelmingly old, repurposed, or algorithmically resurfaced. TikTok’s Global Song of the Year, Connie Francis’s Pretty Little Baby (1962), is a 63-year-old track that found new traction through “wholesome” domestic videos. The sound has been used over 28 million times, often in clips involving pets, toddlers or flower arrangements — content that sits comfortably within TikTok’s current preference for gentle, low-stakes nostalgia.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s Global Artist of the Year, KATSEYE, represents the opposite end of the spectrum: a hyper-modern, globally engineered pop group designed for a platform where choreography drives more attention than melody. Their viral moments — particularly Gnarly and Gabriela — were propelled by dance challenges, celebrity participation and algorithmic amplification rather than traditional fan-building.
The year’s Music Trend of the Year, Doechii’s Anxiety, also emerged through a revival mechanism: a Fresh Prince dance that re-entered circulation, eventually prompting Will Smith to join in. Even new releases, then, seem to require an older cultural artifact to anchor them.
Taken together, TikTok’s top songs form a portrait of a platform where music discovery is increasingly retroactive. Tracks from the 60s, the 2000s and the 2010s outperform contemporary releases, often because they fit neatly into TikTok’s dominant formats: “wholesome edits,” travel montages, dance loops or meme structures. The result is a system where songs succeed less on their original context and more on their adaptability — their ability to be sliced, repurposed or reframed to serve visual content.
TikTok’s impact on charts remains immense (all 13 UK #1s this year began on the app), but the cultural picture is more complicated. Rather than spotlighting new sounds, TikTok is increasingly functioning as an engine of resurfacing — unearthing old catalogues, reviving mid-level hits, and turning brand-adjacent audio into seasonal phenomena.
If nothing else, the 2025 list shows that TikTok isn’t just where music is discovered — it’s where the same music can be discovered again, and again, and again.
For better or worse, the platform has made repetition a feature rather than a glitch — the algorithm favouring what it already knows will work, even if that means the future sounds suspiciously like the past.
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
