Songwriting started to revolve around snippets. I will never forget the first time a young songwriter explained to me the songwriting process that was emerging in the TikTok era: artists were releasing short bits of works-in-progress, essentially A/B testing their own hooks in order to see what was reacting and figure out what songs to finish writing. In 2022, Billboard reported on how labels and artists were abandoning snippets that failed to generate mass enthusiasm, leaving professional songwriters with “dead copyrights” they could no longer place.11
