The song of the summer is … nothing? Why 2025's charts are so stale

The Guardian

2 days ago

A spectre is haunting America – the spectre of Shaboozey.
Despite it coming out in April 2024, Shaboozey's huge hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) is still, billions of streams later, at No 5 on this week's Billboard chart. Its country-tinged refrain of 'everybody at the bar gettin' tipsy,' an interpolation from J-Kwon 2004 hit Tipsy, has stuck around well past closing time.
It's not the only one. It's joined in this week's Billboard Top 10 (which combines streaming and radio airplay data in the US from a given week) by Teddy Swims's Lose Control, which was released in June 2023; Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga's Die With A Smile, which was released in August 2024; and Luther by Kendrick Lamar and SZA, which came out in November 2024.
Chart analysts say that 2025 has produced the fewest new hit songs in US history. The mid-year report from Luminate, the company that produces the data for the Billboard charts, shows that of the top 10 most listened to songs so far this year in the US, only one was released in 2025: Ordinary by Alex Warren. All the others are tracks from 2024 and 2023 – No 1 is Luther.
As a result it kind of feels like this year's song of the summer is sort of … nothing. Or just the same as last year's? Despite a slew of recent releases from artists Lorde, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Miley Cyrus and Lil Wayne, nothing is really crossing the threshold of hit song.
Obviously what makes a summer hit is a somewhat vibes-based determination that is hard to put an exact number on, but in the industry getting close to a billion global streams means you have had an unavoidably massive track - and only Ordinary, along with the two Bad Bunny songs DTMF and Baile Inolvidable that were mostly streamed outside the US, have managed that.
Things were very different this time last year, when almost the entire Top 10 was filled with huge new hits: Not Like Us by Kendrick, Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, Beautiful Things by Benson Boone and the aforementioned Shaboozey – back when it was a new song. All of these reached the billion streams mark, with Chappell Roan and Charli xcx making multiple chart entries later on in the year.
Of course there are thousands of smaller and medium-sized artists who are having great years, but why have things become so stale at the very top of the charts?
In part it is because the overall volume of new music (defined as the songs released in the last 18 months) being listened to is down slightly year on year, around 3%, but it's more pronounced in genres such as pop and hip-hop, where listeners are turning towards nostalgia and delving into back catalogues.
Artists that have produced a lot of hype releases this year like Addison Rae, Lorde and Haim have not produced radio songs that appeal to a mass audience, arguably putting more focus on creating an album and aesthetic that works for committed fans. Even stars such as Lizzo and Justin Bieber, who have topped a billion streams in the past, have made records with less obvious choruses and pop production.
Some artists just are trying and missing. Carpenter, one of the most successful artists of last year, could nott quite recreate the magic this summer with Manchild, which was a small hit and did hit No 1 for a week before falling down the charts. Her album slated for release later in the summer might still provide a song with more chart staying power.
It has long been the case that the pipes through which new music is discovered have become calcified. Less people listen to Top 40 radio, or watch late-night shows, meaning it's harder for a band to have that one big moment when they break into the mainstream. And while TikTok does help certain songs filter into the consciousness, there's still not a fail-safe mechanism for getting them off the app and into the charts.
It does not help that the one song that is unambiguously a breakout mega hit this year, Ordinary by the 24-year-old California singer-songwriter Warren, is a little insipid and forgettable, a song desperately indebted to mid-2010s Hozier and Imagine Dragons. Hardly a feelgood song of the summer.
But, as Jaime Marconette, the vice-president of music insights and industry relations at Luminate, says, this drift away from new music is not present in every genre.
'It's true that in some genres, like R&B and hip-hop, people are listening to less new music, whereas with Christian and country in particular, they're actually gaining listeners to new music.'
He points to Hard Fought Hallelujah, by Christian singer-songwriter Brandon Lake and country star Jelly Roll, as an example of the way the genres are combining to reach wider audiences. 'Christian is the most current streaming genre right now [with the largest proportion of streams to new tracks]. These are genres where their fans were a little bit later to the streaming game but are now starting to really embrace it.'
Marconette also says that this is not unprecedented - there have been other years, particularly during the Covid pandemic, when there were fewer new songs in the charts – after which new music bounced back.
'In the Covid period, there was a lot of dramatic things happening in our world. So, it is interesting that now in a period where there's uncertainty out there, we're seeing it again,' he says. 'Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but we're also starting to notice a jump in people streaming recession pop [music released around 2008 with escapist themes from artists such as Taio Cruz and Nicki Minaj] and it does point to a sort of this communal yearning for things that bring comfort from the past.'
It's not all bad news: a couple of pop songs this year are streaming pretty well: Bad Bunny has had a string of huge hits outside of the US. Carpenter, Ty Dolla $ign, Maroon 5 and Drake all have records coming out this summer that might change things. Marconette also pointed to the return of K-pop group BTS and the success of the soundtrack to Netflix's animated movie KPop Demon Hunters as big players for the second half of the year.
Of course, there is plenty of superlative new music, filed away in millions of private playlists, that might be someone's personal sound of the summer. The charts have never been guardians of taste or even vibes.
But it is much harder for one such song to become a communal and inescapable hit. Whether this year is an anomaly or just another sign of ongoing cultural fragmentation remains to be seen.