Introduction

TikTok recently released their Songs of the Summer 2025, so following the interest in our last post comparing public performance to the UK Radio and Official Charts, we wanted to see how TikTok’s charts stack up against our public performance data.

Huge Differences

Starting at a high-level, the comparison is a little limited since TikTok have only released a top ten chart for certain countries. For this analysis we're concentrating on the UK and US as two major music markets. The TikTok Songs of the Summer charts define ‘summer’ as May to August, so we've use that same timeframe.

I expected the differences to be noticeable - after all, TikTok fuels viral moments while businesses curate a soundtrack to create their sound. But the gap was even bigger than expected: not a single song in TikTok’s UK or US top ten appeared in our respective public performance charts!

In fact, you'll see below that I had to search our top 100,000 tracks to find some of the TikTok songs and even then I couldn't find playback for one of them. So unfortunately, I couldn’t even make a nice overlap chart as it would just have zeros on it 😆.

As with the comparison to streaming and radio charts, this again tells us that public listening is its own ecosystem. It's great to see that this statement holds up in the US as well as the UK.

UK Charts

When comparing the Top 40 UK data for the first half of 2025, we found that public performance had a diverse range of release decades, with 40% of songs originating from previous decades, though the top ten was entirely from the 2020’s.

Sadly, since TikTok has only released a top ten for these charts, we couldn’t dig as deeply into the differences. But we can say that outside of the top ten, we do see older songs getting a huge numbers of plays.

The TikTok top ten for the UK features five songs from the 2020s, followed by three from 2010s, then one from each of the 2000s and 1990s:

The Public performance top ten for the UK is all from the 2020s:

US Charts

Next up, something new - a first look at our US data and how that compares to TikTok.

The data here shows a very different picture to the UK - and although we only looked at the top ten, we can see a stronger preference for older songs than the UK during this period.

The TikTok top ten for the US features five decades of music with the 2010s coming out on top:

The Public performance top ten for the US shows a mix from this century and some classics from the 1970s that we saw in the UK Top 40 analysis - Dreams by Fleetwood Mac and Lovely Day by Bill Withers:

The Charts

As there was no overlap between the TikTok and Public Performance top ten charts, it felt like the best way to present the data was as side-by-side charts.

UK Top Ten

US Top Ten

In Summary

The takeaway? TikTok hits and public performance favourites are worlds apart. When comparing TikTok to Public Performance, we can see that the songs played are completely different. We can also see that at least during the summer months, the US and UK Public Performance plays are wildly different as well.

Steve Robbins, CTO