You have to keep posting, even if you're dead

Dolly Parton’s death on August 25th was a universal cultural event, but not in a way that the internet could easily process. There have definitely been some impressive engagement numbers. She was on our top lists on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and her songs shot to the top of the iTunes and Spotify charts. But they didn’t stay there.

Parton’s popularity around the internet has been rapidly tailing off, both for her songs and on her official accounts, in general. Which is surprising, considering how much her death is weighing on culture. For someone like Parton, this is really just a blink of an eye — American flags were still at half staff in her honor as her engagement was sinking. But things go a lot faster online. And now that the quickening cycle of online culture is just “culture,” it’s worth looking at how that cycle makes it a lot harder for anyone to mourn.

It’s pretty grim to call a beloved entertainer’s death an “organic trend,” but part of my point is that if you do, it was definitely the biggest in a long time. Parton’s name was TikTok’s fourth-biggest hashtag in the US for the month of August, her official Instagram account gained more than 1.5 million followers in the week after her death, and the announcement of her death was Facebook’s third-biggest post for the month. Then, with the usual rhythms for trends, that started to change.

Just a week after Parton’s death, most of the attention had fallen away. As of August 31st, our data from Kworb says that her most popular song, “Jolene,” had fallen from first to 82nd in daily Spotify streams (with 1.3 million streams on that day, compared to 3.9 million at its peak). The only other song in the top 200 at the end of August was “9 to 5,” at number 153 on the chart, and the next day it had entirely vanished from the top 200.

Meanwhile, Parton’s stats around the rest of the internet have tailed off with similar speed. As of September, she’s getting less than 10,000 new Instagram followers a day according to Social Blade, and her name has entirely disappeared from Tiktok’s “popular hashtags” list. This isn’t just a matter of Parton being an older artist, or even a dead one — the same day “9 to 5” dropped off the Spotify daily charts, “Billie Jean” was 15th. It hasn’t left the top 20 since the Michael movie released in the spring. So what’s the difference for Parton?

The numbers make sense when you look at them with the unblinking mechanical eye of the algorithm. Like I said in my Jimothy timeline, the key to a sustained trend is a steady stream of new, participatory content. Parton has one last song in a time capsule to be opened in 2045, but unlike Michael Jackson, there’s no movie studio marketing to keep her in our feeds. So with each passing day she’s automatically ranked a little further down, granted a little less visibility online, because she isn’t uploading any grist for the mill.

Long after these engagement numbers have diminished, I’m still seeing plenty of conversation online about her. But the algorithms seem to be indicative of a larger change in how we collectively process death. It’s been a while since 2016, when David Bowie and Prince died three months apart, those deaths became inextricably linked in culture, and both artists were in the top 15 best-selling albums for the year.

Out of curiosity, I checked the Spotify archives from a decade ago to see how long Bowie and Prince stayed in the top streaming charts. I was genuinely surprised to see that they didn’t last much longer. Bowie had more than 30 songs in the top 200 after his death, but they were all gone a month later. Prince, meanwhile, was on a similar trajectory to Parton, with his songs dropping off the daily charts completely after less than two weeks.

Meaning algorithmic platforms have always behaved this way, even when culture as a whole hasn’t. Since then, pop music has become a great cross section of those platforms’ shadow over all of culture. The entire apparatus of discovering new talent has been subsumed by TikTok. The Billboard charts have been refactored many times to prioritize Spotify streams more. And as we saw this spring, any band that breaks out now faces suspicion of being a marketing psyop. 

There’s a lot less room for grief, mourning, remembrance, anywhere in this cold equation. The last time any major social platform acknowledged death was 2009, when Facebook launched its “memorial account” feature for profiles of people who had died, later extending a similar policy to Instagram. Some other platforms will let next of kin delete profiles or inherit their assets, but Meta is still the only company to outwardly present the living and the dead differently online at all. Dolly Parton’s YouTube and TikTok pages look like nothing ever happened. And it’s hard to avoid the idea that, as far as the algorithms are concerned, anyone who isn’t regularly uploading may as well be dead for all they care.