A Glimpse into 2025: Music Predictions

By Rinah Milter 

Music Journalist 

Happy New Year! Did your Spotify Wrapped suck? Are you looking for something new to spice up your playlists? Well, luckily for you it’s a new year, with new releases and a whole new atmosphere.  

2024 was the year of indie-sleaze, BRAT and Kendrick and Drake’s feud that took us into the last half of 2024. In 2025, as collective listeners, I think we’re going to piggyback off that. There’s Kendrick’s super bowl performance which I have VERY high standards for, and I’m sure everybody will be talking about it. However, At the end of 2024, there was a surge of house music becoming more popular and flowing into the mainstream. There’s more influence of it in pop music, and mixed with jazz and blues, I think it’s going to be huge.  

For example, a lot of artists start trending on social media because most people use their music in the background of their videos, or you’ll see it live. Lately, I’ve been seeing a “bring back club music” movement which is related to the sentiment that dancing at the club isn’t really a thing anymore, because most DJ’s mostly just play rap from 2015-2024. There’s this longing of just hearing good music and letting ourselves free, and I think house music is a lot of people’s outlets for that expression of self.

This happened in the early 2010’s as well with David Guetta, Swedish House Mafia, and of course Daft Punk who are the staple of house/electronic music. Now, artists like Peggy Gou and Black Coffee are taking it into a modern direction and infusing it with their own cultural influences.  

Peggy Gou- Find the Way (Visualiser)

Black Coffee & Julie McKnight at Hi Ibiza 2024

Because of the changing climate in America, I think a lot of people are going to want to go back to “the good old days” and crave a sense of nostalgia, where they don’t have the worries of our modern world. There is such a stark contrast in music culture if you compare America with the rest of the world. I think we’ll get many foreign influences like Korean pop, Afrobeats, European styles, and Latin which will continue to dominate.  

Some other predictions:  

• The “it-girl” is going to stay  

By “it-girl” I mean artists like Chappel Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Gracie Abrams. They all emerged in a huge way and have perfected the blend of indie-girl-alternative-pop genre that is so popular. Olivia Rodrigo as well, taking inspiration from Taylor Swift can also be accredited to this. I think a lot of younger women resonate with raw lyrics and their ability to be very candid in their songs is going to still be at the forefront of what we see in the coming year.  

• French Pop 

This might be a stretch, but considering how popular it’s gotten over the past year, I would expect it to keep doing so. Every season, there is a change in aesthetics. There’s been a grunge revival, soft elegance, that European countryside aesthetic we see every summer, which is why artists like Aya Nakamura got worldwide recognition over last year’s Olympics, and Stromae’s music made a comeback (thanks to Tik Tok). French Pop has that sophisticated elegance and blends that French charm with modern music production, which makes it incredibly appealing.

Stromae- Alors on Danse (official video)