Trends Snapshot Rewind

As 2025 nears its close, it’s worth taking stock of what we’ve learned about emerging culture this year and separating the fad from the fact. We’ll do this by looking back at some of the trends we spotlighted in our regular snapshots, and identifying whether the trend is here to stay, and where it heads next.

Music streaming’s transparency turn – July 2025

We championed the rise of transparent and trustworthy music streaming platforms in the midst of the unprecedented challenge of AI-generated music. Deezer stepped up to the plate by introducing AI song tags. The move helped to increase transparency around AI-generated content, empowering human creativity in the industry.

What’s happened since we identified the trend? In September, Spotify responded by arming its platform with a range of measures, including removing 75 million ‘spam’ songs, improved enforcement of impersonation violations, a new spam-filtering system and AI disclosures for music with industry-standard credits. Challenger services like Nina Protocol, Cantilever and Subvert have also emerged to a welcoming market of listeners who want artists to be the main beneficiaries of their audio habits.

Gen Alpha absurdity – July 2025

‘Chimpanzini Bananini’ and ‘Ballerina Cappuccina’ became the online sensations of the summer with their wonderfully nonsensical TikTok brain rot. Whilst their particular stardom was only ever likely to amount to 15 minutes of fame, it was an early indication that the future of social media trends belongs to Gen Alpha, not Gen Z, and it may take those of us who aren’t Gen Alpha (presumably the vast majority of our readers!) a little while to get up to speed.

Where are we now? 6-7, the online craze inspired by rapper Skrilla’s song Doot Doot (6 7), is the latest movement to baffle anyone over the age of 16, resulting in explainers of the trend for Gen Z. Who thought Gen Z would so quickly look out of date online? While 6-7 is unlikely to last beyond 2025, the lesson is that absurdity is here to stay.

Curated communities – February 2025

Back at the start of the year we shone a light on ‘curated communities’ like Diem which consumers were starting to seek out as a backlash to finely polished and refined public feeds that airbrushed the human connection and insight out of online interactions. What’s happened since then? AI and human tastemakers are finding a natural meeting point. In August, Reddit was revealed to be the most cited domain for AI models, ahead of the likes of Wikipedia and YouTube. Whilst Reddit alone is not a sufficient or accurate tool to solve AI queries, this news speaks to the wider trend of human tastemaking and a desire to base taste and trust on the human experience. The same source cited a recent survey that said 80% of Reddit users believe some questions can only be answered by humans, as opposed to AI-generated summaries. The future will not be free of human influence, but inextricably linked to people’s experiences and tastes.