Football still has a shared song. Pop gave its up years ago.

Somewhere around Bellingham's goal tonight, Wednesday 17 June, a few hundred thousand people who have never met sang the same song at the same time without anyone cueing them. Football still has that. A handful of tunes, the old terrace ones that need no introduction, surface the instant the country gathers, and everybody already knows the words. It is one of the last places the shared song survives in one piece.

Pop music lost it a while ago. The monoculture that once handed the whole country the same number one, heard on the same radio at the same hour, has been broken up by the thing that replaced it: the algorithm, the personal queue, the feed that gives each of us a slightly different soundtrack. Nobody decided this. It is the sound of choice working exactly as designed, and one of its quieter costs is that the shared song, the one a stadium can sing cold, has become very hard to manufacture on purpose.

You can hear the industry reaching for it anyway. The notable UK release this month, out earlier in June, is Aitch, the Manchester rapper, building a new track on Anita Ward's 1979 disco hit 'Ring My Bell'. The instinct is everywhere now: sample, interpolate, reach back for a melody the listener already half-remembers and lend the new song some of the old one's instant familiarity. At its best it is real craft, not laziness; the borrowed hook is a way of buying back a little of the recognition the charts no longer mint from scratch.

But notice what it admits. When the surest route to a song everyone knows is to rebuild one they knew forty-seven years ago, the present is quietly conceding that it finds the shared moment hard to make new. The terrace chant and the disco sample are after the same thing from opposite directions: a tune that belongs to everyone at once, rather than to each of us privately.

This is the thread worth pulling on a night like this. As more of our time comes loose from work, a great deal of it is spent listening, and we increasingly listen alone, perfectly served, each in our own bespoke stream. There is real pleasure in that. There is also something we have half-lost without quite voting for it: the song the whole room knows. Football kept it almost by accident. Tonight it was loud enough to hear through a television. The rest of the week, you mostly have to go looking for it, or reach back forty-seven years and hope the disco still lands.