The Jet2holidays meme is the song of the summer

As the weather heats up and the days get longer, many outlets are asking a simple question: Where’s the song of the summer?

2025 has had no shortage of pop music releases, but as the calendar passes its midway point, many of the current chart toppers are reheated hits that broke out last year. The lack of a consensus song of the summer has led many writers to eulogize the once-ubiquitous trend. Several cultural factors, such as the rise of siloed social media platforms and the decline of Top 40 radio, have been blamed for the song of the summer’s downfall.

“The ‘song of the summer’ feels like a relic of the past,” Taylor Crumpton wrote in a Time article published earlier this year. “With the absence of music video programs, such as Total Request Live and 106 & Park, and the decline in relevance of televised award shows, like the MTV Video Music Awards, the idea of a pop monoculture has not only ceased to exist but has also resulted in the loss of shared cultural touch points that connect (or sometimes, some might say, thrust upon) millions of Americans. In its stead, a fragmented culture has come to exist, thanks to the rise of the curated algorithm and our social media feeds perfectly sculpted to fit our interests and experiences.”

On the surface, Crumpton’s argument is perfectly valid. The song of the summer used to distill an entire season into a single track. The Doors’ “Light My Fire” represented the cultural conflagration that was the Summer of Love. The disco fever of the late 70s gave Andy Gibb back-to-back song of the summer crowns. And if you were alive in 1996, you probably have a memory involving Los Del Rio’s “Macarena.”

In 2025, no song has come close to a “Macarena” level of cultural ubiquity, but a trend that originated on TikTok has. This year, the song of the summer is a short-form trend, because nothing beats a Jet2holiday.

If that last sentence caused you to involuntarily hum the chorus of Jess Glynne‘s 2015 song “Hold My Hand,” then you and I have probably been watching a lot of the same TikToks. An advertisement for the U.K.-based travel company Jet2holidays has become the soundtrack for 1.5 million TikToks, many of which poke fun at the gap between expected vacation experiences and reality.

The Jet2holidays meme has been inescapable in the way a song of the summer is supposed to be. The titular brand has inserted itself into the conversation. So have Glynne and Zoë Lister, the actor who provided the voiceover for the original ad. There has been a predictable stream of parodies and even some uploads that seem to play the ad completely straight.

But this viral fad’s claim to the song of the summer crown is not just a product of its ubiquity. The Jet2holidays meme also expresses the spirit of summertime fun that once defined the annual pop music competition. “Much like the unofficial, crowdsourced competition for ‘song of the summer,’ awarded to whatever catchy pop song becomes the most inescapable, a social media trend like the Jet2holidays ad remixes can spread quickly at a time when many people are sharing videos of summer escapades,” Claire Fahy recently wrote in The New York Times.

Much noise has been made about TikTok’s ability to turn its For You Page faves into global pop stars. The Jet2holidays meme shows us how that process works. It’s not that TikTokers have impeccable musical taste, though some do — it’s that the FYP facilitates the same sort of communal cultural osmosis that once flowed through Top 40 radio stations. That feeling drives TikTok’s prominent position in the music world, and like a Jet2holiday, nothing beats it.