Listen to the most cringe music ever made

Tech companies have been making self-referential music forever, but social media and the attention on technology have made the spotlight brighter — and their affluence has made the productions more over the top.

Have a listen for yourself.

Behold, I give you a hip-hop track about OneDrive, the Microsoft cloud file cabinet that you might be forced to use at work.

Sample lyric: “Listen up y’all/I got a story to tell/about a cloud that got some mad skills to sell.”

This spring, the start-up Canva performed a seemingly “Hamilton”-inspired musical theater number. Onstage, a cool Canva worker clapped back at a stuffy corporate executive who is reluctant to buy the company’s graphic design software.

Sample lyric: “We don’t train on your work/without your permission/safe and securrrrrr/if that is what you’re wishin’.”

The online reaction to the performance was bananas — mostly in a not-so-good way.

“If cringe was a war, this would be a nuclear weapon,” reads one of more than 2,200 replies to an X post about the Canva performance. Other people loved it.

Canva said the musical number generated a lot of attention, social media mentions and Google searches for the Australian start-up. “While not everyone was a fan, this was a risk that ultimately paid off,” a Canva spokesperson said.

There’s also a flourishing genre of enthusiastic cryptocurrency-themed songs. At a 2019 conference, Vitalik Buterin, the influential executive behind the Ethereum crypto network and the digital currency Ether (known by the symbol “ETH”), awkwardly participated in a self-referential song.