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You and I are gonna live forever: why 2024’s pop was all about sharing the moment

Pop may be full of solo artists and individually tailored streams, but the Eras tour, Brat summer and Oasis reunion showed we still long to be part of a crowd

Photograph: Nina Westervelt/Billboard/Getty ImagesBut the most striking thing about pop in 2024 was the way it was dominated by a handful of huge, monocultural stories, which spilled out of the music pages into the mainstream news agenda. Fandoms have become weird, often troubling things that seem to exist as disembodied online entities firing pissy, anonymous social media messages to their idol’s rivals. You could see it in the crowds that flocked to the Eras gigs, who seemed noticeably different from other pop audiences, and were big on intriguingly homespun rituals – it wasn’t as if Swift or her management had told them to come in costume, or trade friendship bracelets, or draw the number 13 on their hands, or develop a series of if-you-know-you-know responses to particular moments in certain songs.

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