3 Strange 21st-Century Trends That Took Over the Music Industry—Then Vanished Overnight

To keep a massive industry afloat, sometimes one has to experiment a bit and essentially throw bizarre ideas at the wall to see what sticks. That’s what many musicians, labels, and producers have done over the years, resulting in some very strange music industry trends that were huge and then disappeared virtually overnight. Let’s look at a few such bizarre trends! You might just remember a few of these.

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The Excessive Use of Auto-Tune in Late-2000s Pop

If you listened to pop music at the end of the 2000s, you probably remember the auto-tune debacle. It seemed like every pop, hip-hop, dance, and even rock tune released at the end of the decade featured vocals drenched in overproduced effects, namely to get them perfectly in tune. A lot of musicians jumped on the trend, but fans really weren’t having it. Even rappers like Jay-Z dropped “D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)” in 2009 as a protest song of sorts. Nobody really liked it, and honestly, excessive auto-tune just didn’t sound good. 

Some might blame Cher’s “Believe” for popularizing it, but I’d say it was the result of producers jumping on new digital trends during an era of great technological advancement in the music industry. Either way, excessive auto-tune disappeared for a while, only to come back in a more sophisticated fashion in the 2010s.

The Ringtone Trend of the Mid-2000s

Back in the mid-2000s, mobile phones were the standard, but smartphones hadn’t quite become the necessary evil they are today. With a modern-day smart phone, you could just download an MP3 of a song you like and set it as your ringtone. Back in the early aughts, that wasn’t quite so simple. Many phone manufacturers only made it possible to use a custom ringtone if you purchased a snippet of one from the now-archaic store application found on flip phones, slides, Blackberry phones, etc. 

As such, a lot of musicians, especially rappers and hip-hop stars, made a killing by selling short snippets of songs for about a dollar each. T-Pain, specifically, really capitalized on this trend and sold millions of ringtone downloads. However, by the time smartphones and streaming became a thing at the end of the 2000s, the ringtone industry had completely disappeared.

The Millennial Indie Folk “Stomp-Clap-Hey” Trend of the Mid-2010s

Some trends in retrospect are just corny. It’s hard to look back at the indie folk revival era of the mid-2010s without some fondness, but the “stomp-clap-hey” trend was so excessive. It was the kind of trend that got into everything in the genre, essentially rendering the genre redundant. Every song sounded exactly the same for a few years. 

For those who missed it, this trend involved “Hey!” chants, foot stomping, and clapping. And this entry on our list of strange music industry trends became so commercialized and predictable that fans dropped interest very quickly. By the late 2010s, the indie folk revival had almost totally died out.

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