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A few weekends ago, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing my friends’ parents to Chappell Roan.
It started when I had a few bars of “Good Luck, Babe” stuck in my head and couldn’t stop humming it. The next thing I knew, we were all learning the “HOT TO GO” dance. And by the end of the weekend, we were sitting on their deck in upstate New York, listening to lyrics about a “sexually explicit kind of love affair” like it was the most normal dinner music in the world.
Now that I’m back home in Brooklyn, I’ve got a new favorite reference: You can’t walk a block without hearing someone bumpin’ one of Charli xcx’s instant club classics (from her album Brat) — even more so now that Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has embraced the internet’s delighted moves tying her to brat summer.
And now’s as good a time as any to mention that for weeks earlier this year, I was perpetually working laaaaate (cuz I’m a singerrrrr). That’s that me, “Espresso.”
These artists — Chappell Roan, Charli xcx, “Espresso”’s Sabrina Carpenter — have ruled my playlists this summer. My friends are playing their songs at parties. My social media feeds are overwhelmed with news and memes about them. They’re inescapable.
So they must all be contenders for 2024’s song of the summer, right? … Right?!
Wrong. Take a look at the top of the Billboard Songs of the Summer chart right now and you’ll find that the Top 10 is chaos. Post Malone and Morgan Wallen occupy the top spot with their song “I Had Some Help,” a song that I really don’t think I could hum for you, even if pressed. Someone that I have literally never heard of, Tommy Richman, is in the fourth spot.
So what gives? How are these no-names beating out the biggest pop girlies for song of the summer? And if I barely recognize the most popular song in America right now, is there even such a thing as a song of the summer anymore?
What is the song of the summer?
In the absence of an agreed-upon definition, it’s helpful to take a look at the history of the song of the summer. The concept goes back further than you might expect — all the way to the 19th century, when tunes mostly circulated via sheet music.
As Phil Edwards wrote for Vox a few years ago, sales were slow-going. It could take decades for early bops like 1826’s “The Old Oaken Bucket” to permeate across the country.
As we rolled into the next century, new technologies like the radio helped popularize songs much more widely and quickly. But while songs could become popular in the summertime, there was still no official song of the summer.
“It’s not like people were walking around in 1925 and saying, ‘You think that’s the summer song this year?’” music critic and author David Hajdu told CNN. “But the phenomenon was beginning to happen.”
When Billboard dropped its first Hot 100 chart in 1958 with Domenico Modugno’s Italian ballad “Nel Blu di Pinto de Blu (Volaré)” at the top, it gave us a metric to define the song of the summer, but it certainly didn’t invent the concept. For a while, the Hot 100 seemed to correctly identify the most omnipresent music of the season: 1964, The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?”; 1976, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee; 1982, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”
But that changes when we get into the 2000s. The aughts begin with songs so recognizable that we felt we didn’t even need to play them on our recent episode of Today, Explained: “Crazy in Love.” “Umbrella.” “Call Me Maybe.” “Despacito.” By the 2020s, things start to get wacky: I don’t know about you, but DaBaby’s “Rockstar” certainly didn’t define 2020 for me. Last year, I didn’t even hear n-word user Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” so how could it have been the song of the summer?
So do we have a song of the summer anymore, or what?
You might be shocked to learn that music listening has changed since Billboard first started naming summer hits. We are now in what scientists have tentatively begun calling the “streaming era,” where a huge chunk of listening takes place on platforms like YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music in addition to the radio.
The change has diminished radio DJs and music executives’ ability to name hits, and it has shifted power to the listeners, many of whom are influenced by Spotify’s personalized recommendation algorithms, which the company has prioritized at least since 2020.
Since Billboard’s Hot 100 chart takes streaming into account, musicologist and Switched on Pop co-host Charlie Harding argues that the charts are more accurate now.
“In the era of mass media monoculture, we just weren’t as talented at capturing people’s collective listening,” Harding said on Today, Explained. “Sure, maybe they were being broadcast more of the same stuff, but you didn’t know what people were playing back to back on their boombox. Now we can actually count exactly what people are listening to on streaming services.”
The streaming era has allowed new and different kinds of artists to enter the charts organically, building fandoms via nontraditional pathways. Right now, Harding points out, the top of the charts reflects all sorts of different communities of listening: a Black country artist in Shaboozey, pop princess Sabrina Carpenter, Big Three rapper Kendrick Lamar, alternative indie slow-burn Hozier …
But music listening is, to some extent, a zero-sum game. As we stream our way into our niche listening rabbit holes, the very biggest artists have started to see their streams decrease, too. All this creates a world in which you might not recognize the Billboard-ordained song of the summer.
But maybe that doesn’t matter.
“Whatever your community is listening to, that’s going to be your song of summer,” Harding told us. “I think you shouldn’t stress about what everyone is listening to. I think you should pay attention to what your friends and community are connecting with.”
This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
