A 15-Year-Old Katy Perry Song Just Won TikTok’s Summer — Stop Calling Your Music Old

A record released in 2011 just became one of the biggest songs on TikTok in 2026.

That sentence alone should change the way independent artists think about their catalogs.

Katy Perry's “The One That Got Away” found an entirely new life on TikTok this summer, becoming the platform's Global Song of the Summer 15 years after its original release.

Millions of videos and billions of views later, a song that had already lived through its original radio run, music-video campaign and album cycle suddenly became part of another generation's soundtrack.

That isn't just nostalgia.

It is a fundamental change in how music is discovered.

In the traditional record business, songs had relatively defined promotional windows. Labels sent singles to radio, worked them for a period of time and eventually moved attention toward the next release.

Social media destroyed that expiration date.

A song can return because somebody creates a dance.

It can reappear because of a movie scene.

A breakup lyric can become a trend.

A 10-second section of an album cut can become a meme.

One influential creator can expose a song to millions of people who had never heard it.

For independent artists, that should be encouraging.

It should also make some artists rethink the way they promote music.

Too many independent artists call a song old after three weeks.

A single drops, receives a few social posts, gets added to a handful of playlists and then disappears because the artist is already promoting the next record.

But if only 500 or 5,000 people actually heard the song, how is it old?

The music isn't old.

The campaign stopped.

There is a difference.

Artists should routinely revisit their catalogs and look for opportunities they missed the first time.

Maybe the record never received a performance video.

Maybe one lyric could become a short-form content series.

Maybe the song deserves a remix.

Maybe the artist never explained the story behind it.

Maybe a stripped-down version reveals something completely different.

Maybe the hook fits a cultural moment today better than it did when the song originally dropped.

Owning music means having the ability to keep working it.

That doesn't mean reposting the same cover art every month and screaming “stream my song.”

It means finding new ways to introduce the record.

Katy Perry's resurgence demonstrates that audiences don't care whether they discovered a song on release day.

They care about whether the record connects with them at the moment they hear it.

Independent artists should remember that before burying another single.

Your biggest song might already be sitting in your catalog.

The world just hasn't found it yet.

Maya Sinclair
BTS Music Group — We Don't Follow the Map. We Change the Whole Route.