Musical notes: Justin Bieber's TikTok-friendly Yummy is too eager to go viral

The Guardian’s new monthly column gathers all the ideas, trends and other musical flotsam that slips through the cultural net. Share your own thoughts on the month in music, and we’ll feature some next month

Pop and rock music, in its multifarious forms, seems to shift faster than ever. In 2020, we’re bombarded not just with music – more of which is readily available to everyone than at any point in history – but an unrelenting barrage of the stuff that goes along with music: visuals, scenes, theories, arguments, counter-arguments and controversies both real and manufactured. It can feel overwhelming, impossible for even the most plugged-in, social media-literate listener to keep up with. No matter how much of the waterfront you try to cover, it’s hard to rid yourself of the nagging sensation that you might have missed out on something. That’s as true of us in the music media as it is of any other listener. The idea behind the Guardian’s new monthly Musical Notes column is to collect a miscellany of smaller ideas, thoughts, experiences and trends about music: stuff that’s interesting, striking or telling, but doesn’t necessarily fit within the Guardian’s standard feature, review or news formats. I’ll be contributing each month along with music editors Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Laura Snapes – but we also want to include you, too. Share your thoughts, ideas and experiences about any genre of music each month in the comments section – be it a song or gig you’ve loved, a trend you’ve spotted, or indeed anything musical that piqued your interest – and we’ll publish a selection of them in the following month’s column. For now, here’s Ben and Laura to kick off the series with what they’ve been reflecting on in the first week of 2020. Alexis Petridis

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