A song u know but 4got the title of.

<3_music_:
“ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(ƟӨ)ʃ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡ ꐑ(ཀඊູ ఠీੂ೧ູ࿃ूੂ✧✧✧✧✧✧ළ” — do you know this song? I found it on TikTok. You know about that trend where they ask people on the street what they are listening to? And in that video the girl was listening to this song. She just pronounced the song title like gibberish: kaojhflskfösl.

TITLE.LoVer:
Saved the song immediately. I could never find it again otherwise. Did you know it’s Four Tet’s side project? In articles they just refer to it as his Webdings alias.

<3_music_:
Have you seen that other TikTok where someone is asking how that artist name is being pronounced and then this linguist breaks it down? So ‘⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ’ is using characters from Brahmic scripts like Tibetan, Tamil and Bengali. Then if you take out all the characters which don’t belong to any script and use the brackets as spaces in between words you could pronounce this as Slóchl īy ļīļāyóxhl.

TITLE.LoVer:
I love the look of the title. In a way I feel like I would always recognise the artist just because of their spelling.

<3_music_:
Sometimes I wonder if they don’t want to be found. Or if they try to make a joke about streaming culture. I mean who remembers a song title anyways? Most people just listen to individual songs on Spotify but don’t bother to know the title or artist.

TITLE.LoVer:
I read this article ‘Spotify Is Killing Song Titles’. It says that over the years the number of unique words have increased. Song titles become hyper-specific and more random.

<3_music_:
Through Spotify music kind of loses its context. An album becomes a song which becomes a stream. No record store, no radio, you’re just left with an abstract number.

TITLE.LoVer:
They announced the death of the album years ago already. Songs are so much shorter today due to how streaming works. The shorter they are the quicker they accumulate streams. And even then you can barely make a living just from the royalty payout. So why not just say fuck you and do whatever you want. Be as arbitrary as you want. In the end the odds of getting big are just so small.

<3_music_:
Have you heard of Crisis (The Worthless Album)? Valentin Hansen cut every song of his album into 29 second parts. A stream only counts after 30 seconds. So this album will never make any money or streams. Later in 2022 he then released the full song version Crisis (The Valuable Album).

TITLE.LoVer:
What a meme! Another article: ‘Memes are the new pop stars’. Go viral or go nowhere in your career… Sueco the child promotes all his music on Tiktok. And the way he produces a song is a joke in itself. Made a beat out of women twerking against keyboards. Made a beat blindfolded, etc.

<3_music_:
I mean Soulja Boy’s Superman Dance for ‘Crank That’ was a meme in 2007 already.

TITLE.LoVer:
The point for me is that TikTok demands music discovery in a way that Spotify doesn’t. Becoming viral, becoming a trend is like a short-lived cultural moment, demanded by the algorithm. Viral dances or songs get a personal spin by every user participating in the trend, meaning something that’s already existing, just like a meme.

<3_music_:
That makes me think of brat’s social media campaign. It heavily relies on ‘brat green’, its fuzzy font and its ‘badly’ justified typesetting. By being used so much on social media, the branding became a cultural moment, inescapable and more recognisable with each new user participating. The ‘brat online generator’ facilitated this even more and makes the campaign so meme-able.

TITLE.LoVer:
100%! What I like most about TikTok though is that it also gives a platform to really young, inexperienced and non-established artists. Just so quick and easy to upload and if you then go viral even better. Made to burn fast?

<3_music_:
Coming back to Valentin Hansen: In his newest never ending project max, Hansen uses machine learning to generate a new song every two minutes. In February 2025 it already consists of 34,025 songs, adding up to about 51 days of continuous music. Hansen compares the experience of listening to this project to scrolling through TikTok – an infinite amount of music to be discovered, non-stop content to be consumed, next song, next song, next song.

TITLE.LoVer:
I mean generally going viral is just a first step I would say. It’s a bypass to industry barriers, a way to engage with listeners and build a community. After that other things can come. Playing live, being listed in playlists on streaming platforms, being charted or even a record deal.

<3_music_:
Talking about playlist listings. Do you know the Spotify playlist meme? You know when you arrange a playlist so that the song titles form a message, like a fun writing prompt.

TITLE.LoVer:
It started in 2017 with a girl making a playlist to tell a boy that she was no longer interested in dating him. After tweeting that, others followed.

<3_music_:
But coming back to spelling: maybe song titles are also so weird because of algospeak. People seek to bypass social media moderation filters. Code words or turn of phrases help to not have content taken down. Le dollar bean instead of lesbian. Unalive instead of dead. And these phrases then get added to our vocabulary.

TITLE.LoVer:
The thing with these moderation filters is that they inherit a certain inequality. Conversations about women’s health or Palestine get shut down by these filters. The need for being creative comes from something more important than just having fun with language.

<3_music_:
I guess that’s also applicable for song titles. Streaming is just an unfair business model for artists. Spotify for example pays $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, assuming the artist owns 100% of the publishing and master recording rights. And since 2024, songs with less than 1,000 streams within a twelve month period don’t qualify at all for a payout. This is about two-thirds of Spotify’s song catalogue.

TITLE.LoVer:
With the phenomena of the lowercase girls, like Billie Eilish or Charlie XCX, another need is being expressed. All uppercase song titles are predominantly used by male artists. All lowercase in a world where Trump only tweets in ALL CAPS is showing authenticity and vulnerability. It’s a play with hierarchy.

<3_music_:
Online-listening-first music consumption of course is being influenced by online culture, social media platforms, their overall aesthetic and politics.

TITLE.LoVer:
And the idea of aestheticised spelling in song titles and artist names has been around for a while by now. I am thinking of deliberate misspelling as in The Beatles instead of The Beetles. I am thinking ‘U Got The Look’, ‘I Would Die 4 U’ by Prince. The Nu Metal genre, the countless $-signs of hip-hop music and of course the metal umlaut.

<3_music_:
In a way it is freeing to see that people are doing whatever they want to do. Songs might be harder to find the way some of them are spelled. Titles like ‘╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌’, ‘░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓░▓’, ‘• — • — • – – • – • • •’ or ‘┼┼┼┼ససి:ఋrqwవఅ⦂స్మిక్┼ర┼చన┼లో┼సిరామర┼క┼జోన్┼℺’ are hardly readable yet alone pronounceable but I find it entertaining and fun.

TITLE.LoVer:
I also find it striking that this aesthetic of writing has a specific feel to it. It’s refreshing to see people use every unicode sign there is.