On February 14^th, 2026, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” was still exclusively on Country radio when it first reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. By September 26^th, when it broke the record for the most weeks at #1 for any song in Hot 100 history, “Choosin’ Texas” was a hit among Pop fans who never even listen to Country. It was even the official Song of the Summer for 2026.

Today’s country boom isn’t just Ella Langley.

The previous month, for the week ending August 8^th, 2026, the Top 5 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart were all Country songs. That’s never happened in the chart’s entire 68-year history. Ella shared the top of the chart with Morgan Wallen, Stella Lefty, and Taylor Swift’s foray back into Country.

As I showcased in my previous Graphs About Songs, Country charting on the all-genre Hot 100 chart occurs in boomlets—and the current Country boomlet, which started in 2023, is bigger than all of them.

The current Country boomlet directly corresponds to Country fans finally embracing streaming. They were the last genre fanbase to do so, with Hip Hop fans shifting to streaming from paid downloads back around 2017 and Pop fans embracing streaming during the pandemic.

Streaming introduces a fundamentally different way of measuring music consumption: Instead of gauging how many individual fans like a song (as measured by purchasing a 45, a CD, or an iTune), streaming measures how many times someone plays a song.

If you loved “Friends in Low Places,” your fandom only counted when you bought Garth Brooks’ No Fences CD, no matter how many years you kept playing it. When you stream Ella Langley today, every time you hit play is your vote for “Choosin’ Texas” on the Billboard charts.

That change from people to plays has changed Country’s trajectory on the charts in three ways.

Three ways Streaming has changed how we measure Country

1) Songs no longer need a presence on Pop radio—which means more Country songs are reaching the top rungs of the Hot 100.

for all past Country boomlets, Billboard only counted airplay from Top 40 Pop stations towards a song’s place on the Hot 100 Pop chart. No matter how many listeners tuned into Country radio, those spins on Country radio didn’t count. It was possible for a Country hit to reach the lower rungs of the Hot 100 based solely on its single song sales. For a song to reach the Top 10, such as Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” or “Rhinestone Cowboy” from Glen Campbell it took Top 40 radio playing the song to take it to #1.

Billboard eliminated that rule in 1998, but it’s streaming that has truly leveled the playing field. As a genre-agnostic platform, if a song is big enough among Country partisans, it can make the Hot 100 without crossing over to Top 40 Pop radio.

The chart below shows how many individual Country songs reached the Billboard Hoit 100’s Top 10 each year, regardless of how long each song remained in the Top 10. You can clearly see how Country fans embracing streaming correlates with more Country songs in the Top 10 than ever before.

As we’ll see in #3, however, crossing over to the Pop fanbase can still make a big song massive.

2) Streaming rewards Country songs’ longevity on the Hot 100—because when fans keep playing a song, that song stays on the chart.

For most Pop fans, songs have a season. Even the biggest hits lose their luster after half a year or so. Country fans, however, simply don’t get sick of their favorite new songs the way Pop fans do.

Since streaming measures every time someone plays a song—including songs fans keep playing for months—the switch from measuring the moment someone buys a song to every time someone plays a song keeps the big Country hits on the charts much longer than the typical Pop hit.

Consider the streaming patterns for “Die With A Smile,” a massive Pop ballad for Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, compared to Zach Bryan’s “Something In The Orange,” one of the first Country songs to become a huge hit on streaming.

On the graphs below…

• Spotify Streams: The green line is the number of Spotify streams the song received each week

• Momentum Index^SM: The bars underneath the green line show the song’s Momentum Index, a proprietary algorithm I developed to calculate how a song’s streaming week to week compares to other proven, mass-appeal hits. For this example, simply know that

  • Light blue means new fans are still discovering the song

  • Green means the song is still a relevant hit

  • Yellow means fans are increasingly listening to the song less as they get tired of it.

“Die With A Smile” performs like a typical hugely popular, mass appeal ballad: After 40 weeks, fans began streaming the song less and less as they grow tired of it. They might still love the song, but they now think of it as last season’s hit:

In comparison, even after well over a year, fans weren’t getting sick of “Something In The Orange. They kept playing it at comparable levels week after week:

This longer lifespan for Country songs—which streaming is finally capturing—means that today’s biggest Country hits are spending an above average number of weeks in the Top 10.

3) When songs do cross over, they get two back-to-back chart runs.

In the past, songs were hits concurrently among Country and Pop partisans. In today’s streaming era, a song can go months as a Country-only hit before Pop fans embrace it.

That means Country songs that become Pop hits nowadays are essentially getting two consecutive chart runs—one as a Country hit, the second as a Pop hit.

Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” is a great example of a song that first enjoyed months of strong appeal among Country partisans before it crossed over to Pop

The Country songs that have stayed in the Top 10 the longest have also been Pop hits, including Shaboozy’s “A Bar song (Tipsy)” and “I Had Some Help” from Morgan Wallen, and of course, “Choosin’ Texas.”

Is Country really bigger than ever?

Country is most certainly having a great moment: As our last Graphs About Songs spotlighted, Country booms on the Pop chart when Pop music is in a downcycle and when Adults are overwhelmingly picking the hits. Is Country two-and-a-half times as popular in 2026 than it was at the height of the Urban Cowboy fad of the early 1980s? I’d argue no, not because Country’s appeal is overrepresented on today’s Hot 100, but because Country was underrepresented on yesterday’s Hot 100.

By measuring whenever fans play a song, the genre-agnostic Streaming data that comprise the bulk of the Hot 100 chart today is finally giving Country its fair share.

Data sources for this article:

• Spotify 200 Chart for the USA: https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us

• The Billboard Hot 100: https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

• Wikipedia’s Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 singles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_top-ten_singles

• Billboard’s 2025 year-end charts: Hot 100 Songs: https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2025/hot-100-songs/

• Billboard’s 2025 year-end charts: Streaming Songs (Top 75): https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2025/streaming-songs/

• (Data from previous years’ Billboard Year End charts archived)

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For the week ending August 8^th, 2026, the Top 5 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart were all Country songs. That’s never happened in the chart’s entire 68-year history

At #1 that week was Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” which now holds the record for the most weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 of not just any Country song, but of any song. That’s especially remarkable because there have only been about 35 to 40 Country songs (depending on what you consider Country) that reached #1 on the Pop charts.

2026 is on track to be the biggest year for Country music on the nation’s Pop chart. As of early October, 3 of the Top 10 songs in a typical week were Country songs. That’s remarkable, because there are years—as recently as 2014-2016—when not a single Country title reached the Hot 100’s Top 10.

The chart above shows the percentage of Country titles in the Hot 100’s Top 10 by year. You can clearly see that Country’s success on the Pop chart comes in boomlets, sometimes only lasting a year. Why does Country suddenly become popular among Pop fans, then seemingly vanish from the chart? What can we learn from examining the last four times Country has surged into the Top 10 on the Pop charts that explains Country’s record-setting chart performance today?

Let’s take a tour of the four previous Country Crossover boomlets

Boomlet #1: Crooners and Comedy (1960)

After a plane crash in Iowa killed Buddy Holley, Ritchie Valenz, and The Big Bopper in 1959 (Yes, the one that made Don Mclean rich), they seemingly took all of the original Rock ‘n’ Roll with them. The Army drafted Elvis. Little Richard found Jesus.

The following year, the Hot 100 was awash in corny Country. There were sappy and sad tales, such as Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” and Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have To Go.”

What truly made the 1960-peaking Country Crossover era faddish were the onslaught of truly terrible novelty records: Johnny Horton’s “The Battle Of New Orleans,” attempts to be funny enough to make a forgotten 1815 military battle memorable. Stonewall Jackson (the name alone says it all) gave us “Waterloo,” where historical figures face their final curtain in another attempt at comedy.

The biggest Country crossover hit was Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” a tale of how his love for a “Mexican maiden” led to his murder.

Country continued crossing over until the Beatles and The Rolling Stones revived Rock ‘n’ Roll during the British invasion. A decade later, Country would infuse itself with the sound of Rock.

Boomlet #2: The Mellow Outsiders (1974-1975)

In 1974, Olivia Newton John hadn’t yet become a Pop icon. Grease was four years away. She was a Country artist with twangy tunes such as “Let Me Be There” and “If You Love Me (Let Me Know),” plus softer songs such as “”Have You Never Been Mellow”” and “I Honestly Love You.” All four of these songs were Top 10 Country hits—but also massive hits on pop-oriented Adult Contemporary radio stations.

So when this Australian with pop sensibilities won the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year award in 1974, the Nashville establishment lost their hats: George Jones and Tammy Wynette even formed the Association of Country Entertainers (ACE) to keep Country pure, feeling the CMA wasn’t adequately gatekeeping the genre.

You’ll notice a theme here.

The following year, when another non-Nashvillian John Denver won the CMA Entertainer of the Year award, a drunk Charlie Rich set fire to the card announcing Denver’s victory before presenting him the award. That was—well—rich coming from Charlie, who himself scored a #1 Pop crossover hit with his Countrypolitan tune “The Most Beautiful Girl”

It wasn’t simply the performers that spooked traditionalists: Fans of Olivia Newtron John and John Denver’s kind of Country were not the traditional rural American fans. They were young adult urban-dwelling Boomers who saw Country as a way to mellow out, not as a way of life. To them, Modern Country didn’t sound that different from The Eagles, Bread, and Credence Clearwater Revival. That new audience would be pivotal to Country’s most famous boomlet.

Boomlet #3: The Urban Cowboy (1981)

After Saturday Night Fever’s success, they decided to move it from a Brooklyn disco to a Houston honky-tonk. Urban Cowboy portrayed a new kind of Country fan; he’s young, lives in the city, and works an industry job, not the middle-aged rural farmer stereotypically loyal to the genre. It spawned a wave of Country songs ascending the Pop chart, many who had nothing to do with the movie, from Eddie Rabbit, Ronnie Milsap, Johnny Lee, Juice Newton, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton.

It certainly didn’t hurt Dolly Parton becoming a moviestar.

Two years later—after Rogers and Parton reached #1 with “Islands In The Stream”—the Urban Cowboy fad was over. Generation X was now picking the hits, and they made MTV-style New Wave the in sound.

Nashville felt burned by the rejection of mainstream Pop fans:

Collectively deciding to dance with the fans that always loved them, a new crop of neo-traditionalist artists wanted nothing to do with the Pop audience: Randy Travis, The Judds, Ricky Skaggs, Patty Loveless, and George Straight all emerged as superstars among Country’s core fanbase, but virtually unknown among Top 40 partisans.

This was by design.

In the 1990s. as Country exploded (and changes in chart methodology proved the Country audience was bigger than previously estimated), Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Reba McEntire:, and Books & Dunn not only didn’t court Pop fans, they aggressively avoided promoting songs beyond Country’s base. Garth Brooks famously refused to release singles so his songs would be ineligible for the Hot 100 chart, even as his albums routinely debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. They’d been burned before by the fickle tastes of Pop fans—they weren’t going to risk their careers on their whims again.

With the lone exception of Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart,” no Country title reached the Hot 100’s Top 10 from 1983 until 1997.

The absence finally ended with three women too big to ignore.

Boomlet #4: The Women of Country (1997-2000)

LeAnn Rimes never reached #1 on the Hot 100 with her 1997 hit “How Do I Live”. It spent so much time on the chart, however, that Billboard named it the #1 song of the decade. Its record 32 weeks in the Hot 100’s Top 10 stood until the streaming era gave us the mega-hit.

The following year, Canadian newcomer Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One” spent 23 weeks in the Hot 100’s Top 10. “This Kiss” from Faith Hill was the first of several pf her hits that would become Top 10 Pop hits.

Unlike past Country crossover boomlets, where a dozen artists had major Pop hits, these three artists---Rimes, Hill, and Twain—almost exclusively created the first half of this boomlet. with a handful of massive crossover hits that stayed on Country, Top 40, and Adult Contemporary radio stations for months.

In 2000, Faith Hill struck again with three songs in the Hot 100’s Top 10, the biggest being “Breathe.” It only reached #2, but it stayed in the Top 10 for 19 weeks.

The biggest crossover hit of 2000, however, was Lonestar’s “Amazed,” the first #1 Country hit on the Hot 100 since “Islands In The Stream.”

Like other songs during this boomlet the labels released two versions of “Amazed:” One for Country stations, and a version that toned down the steel guitars and other country signifiers for Top 40 and Adult Contemporary radio stations. Billboard counts them as the same song.

So what do these boomlets have in common? Are they predictable? And what do they tell us about the state of music in 2026?

#1: Country fills Pop music vacuums

The 1960 boomlet occurred when the biggest Rock ‘n’ Roll stars were no longer there, but before the Beatles invaded. The Urban Cowboy fad of 1981 was after we overdosed on Disco, but before MTV made New Wave happen.

When Pop music is in a slump., fans often turn to Country . That’s definitely happening now in the 2020s. And who is unhappy with Pop matters, too:

#2 Country becomes popular when adults are p picking the hits

Contemporary Country has always enjoyed far broader age appeal than other Contemporary genres. Right now, in Knoxville, there are septuagenarians listening to 107.7 WIVK—and they know every artist. Mathematically, that means when the tastes of adults dominate the Pop chart, Country becomes more popular:

In the early 1960s, the Silent generation teens who loved Elvis, the Coasters, and Buddy Holley were growing up, but Baby Boomers weren’t old enough yet to control which songs became popular. They would when the Beatles invaded.

In the early 1981s, Boomers were aging into Yuppies, but Gen X hadn’t yet gotten control of the Pop charts with New Wave, Michael Jackson, and Prince.

In 2000, Generation X were no longer teens and their Alternative Rock and Rap were mellowing out, but Millennials hadn’t yet transformed streetwise Gangsta Rap into Clubbing Crunk.

As you’ll notice on the chart below, Country boomlets—with the exception of the mid-70s mellowists—coincide with adults picking the hits:

As I detailed in When The Adults Pick The Hits, we’re experiencing an adult dominated chart right now in the mid 2020s: The same demographics making Teddy Swims “Lose Control” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” massive hits are also a part of the coalition making Ella Langley famous beyond Nashville.

#3 Country becomes popular when it courts Pop fans---until now.

Historically, Country has only succeeded on the Pop charts when artists and labels actively courted the Pop audience. Until the 1990s, The Hot 100 only counted airplay on Top 40 radio stations. Unless a record label actively courted airplay from Pop radio, they weren’t going to appear on the Hot 100.

They did so by actively promoting songs with crossover potential to Pop radio stations and, starting in the late 1990s, releasing Country and Pop mixes of the same recording. Without this intentional effort, Country songs stayed exclusively on Country charts.

Furthermore, until late 1998, Country artists could make themselves ineligible for the Hot 100 simply by not issuing a retail single—a chart rule Country artists like Garth Brooks exploited to avoid competing with Pop stars.

Today, the Hot 100 chart works very differently.

In a follow up, I’ll show why today’s boomlet is different from past ones—including why boomlet #5 is so much bigger than the first four Country crossover boomlets.

And yes, it’s because of streaming.

Data sources for this article:

• The Billboard Hot 100: https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

• Wikipedia’s Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 singles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_top-ten_singles

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Once upon a time, every town’s Top 40 radio station had a live evening disc jockey who took listeners’ requests. They’d play back phone calls from listeners saying what they wanted to hear, and maybe some crazy antics they were up to that night.

(Domino on Atlanta’s Power 99 takes requests and… other stuff… live in the studio in 1991.)

Stations often counted down the night’s requests with a “Top 5 at Nine.” The radio personalities who hosted nights were celebrities at local high schools. Even teens who’d already abandoned Top 40 for Led Zepplin and Rush knew these night jocks’ names.

(John Records Landecker hosts nights on 89 WLS Chicago in 1977 at the height of his Boogie Check.)

Those shows are long gone in most towns. Challenges in the radio industry replaced the live evening host with cost-saving pre-recorded patter. With no one to answer the phones, people don’t call radio stations like they used to, either. People don’t call anyone like they used to.

There is one place where the request-driven evening show is alive and well—and even growing: Liveline with Mason Kelter is a nationally syndicated show airing on over 90 radio stations in the U.S., in cities as big as Seattle and as small as Keene, New Hampshire.

The premise of the show is simple: You call 1-85-LIVELINE, request a song, and Mason plays it. He’ll get you to admit to something hilarious if he can and put you on the air. With its nationwide audience, Mason has no trouble attracting callers.

(You can also text in your request if you insist on being asocial.)

Every week, Liveline publicly publishes its Top 20 requests on Instagram and in the “Mason’s Observations” column on RadioInsight and in Sean Ross’ “Ross on Radio” newsletter.

For me, those requests are valuable data about song popularity---and I’m here to analyze them.

I’ve gathered one year’s worth of those requests from the week ending September 12^th, 2025 through September 12^th, 2026, to find out what we can learn from what America’s Pop radio listeners call in to hear. For this analysis, I’m excluding Holiday songs (namely songs listeners request at Christmas, Independence Day, or Halloween), as well as older gold titles listeners requested that weren’t current hits. To define how old each song is, I’ll compare each song to the week it debuted in the U.S. Spotify 200 chart.

Here are five things I learned from Liveline’s Top 20 requests:

#1: Fans start requesting songs from big artists before they’ve even heard them.

When artists with huge fan bases release a song—think Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, or sombr—listeners start requesting those new releases immediately.

“The Fate of Ophelia,” “drop dead,” I Just Might,” “hate that I made you love me,” and, “Homewrecker,” all were among Liveline’s Top 20 requests within a week of debuting. That means fans not only were anticipating the release of these songs but were requesting to hear them before they had ever heard them.

That’s congruent with streaming, where Artist Stans binge new releases. Since streaming measures plays—not people—-those new songs from big artists are huge on streaming long before the vast majority of causal fans have even heard them.

But not every song gets requested immediately…

#2: Other songs take time for fans to start requesting.

For other songs, listeners have to hear them and get to know them before they start requesting them enough to make them among the Top 20 requests: That’s especially true of songs that crossover to Pop radio from other genres, such as Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” and Dexter and the Moonrocks’ “Freskin Out,” which Country and Alternative listeners, respectively, had been enjoying for months before becoming Pop hits got on board.

However, some pure Pop songs also take time to develop requests: Zara Larsson’s “Midnight Sun,” ADÉLA’s, ”Ain’t In LA,” SIENNA SPIRO’s “Die On This Hill,” Noah Kahan’s “Orbiter,” and even Taylor Swift’s :”Opalite” were all popular on streaming for at least four weeks before listeners started calling Liveline to request them.

#3: Listeners get sick of some songs very quickly—often the same songs that tank quickly in streaming.

After her hugely popular album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Chappell Roan’s fans were primed for what was next. “The Giver,” her foray into Country, quickly tanked. Her next single, “The Subway,” was more in her wheelhouse—except it wasn’t. It lacked the fun melodies and direct lyrics of her hits, instead sounding like a Taylor Swift Pastiche.

Listeners responded accordingly.

On Spotify, after debuting with an outstanding 16 million plays in its first week, it’s streams fell in half in its second week. After 13 weeks, “The Subway” was off the Spotify 200 entirely, while several of her hits from the previous year stayed on the 200.

At Liveline, Roan fans stopped requesting “The Subway” after only four weeks.

Harry Styles’ “Aperture,” BTS’ “SWIM,” and Alex Warren’s “FEVER DREAM,” also stopped receiving requests after less than four weeks. Listeners still love the artists, but didn’t gel with these specific songs.

#4: Listeners still request the huge hits month after month—usually the same songs that keep testing well in callout research.

I pick on Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” as the songs radio keeps playing even after they’re years old. The fact is, radio keeps playing them because listeners still love them: “Lose Control” still made Liveline’s Top 20 requests three years after it debuted. “Ordinary” still got requests as late as 21 months after it was new.

Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” Billie Eilish’s “BIRDS OF A FEATHER, Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” were all Top 20 requests a year and a half after debuting. The weeknd”s Blinding Lights even made the Top 20 over six years after its debut.

#5: Requests are slower than streaming but faster than callout

So how do Liveline’s listener requests compare to other common song popularity metrics?

Here’s the vintage distribution of the Liveline’s Top 20 requests during the past year: The majority of those requests are for songs that are 1 to 20 weeks old:

That’s slower than streaming. As I’ve harped on consistently here on Graphs About Songs, since streaming measures how many times people play a song, not how many individual people play it, raw stream counts are heavily skewed towards brand new songs from big artists, whose fans repeatedly play them as soon as they drop. While the most popular songs can remain Top 20 on Spotify for years, the majority of Top 20 songs on Spotify in a typical week are 1 to 12 weeks old. (The chart below is for Spotify data covering 1/1/2025 through 9/17/2026):

On the other hand, the songs listeners request are significantly newer than the best-testing songs in callout research. I don’t have access to the Top 20 national callout for the same timeframe, which would be a truly fair comparison: The only publicly published callout data I have is Coleman Insights’ Integr8 USA (Bias disclosure: I oversaw Coleman’s callout research division from 2009-2024). Top three songs from September 2024 through March 2026, which they published in various radio trade outlets and on their own social media during that time.

The majority of songs typically aren’t reaching the panicle of callout until they’re half a year to almost a year old. That’s weeks—and months—after requests for most songs have dried up.

What have we learned here?

1. A significant number of listeners are interested in hearing brand new songs from their favorite artists. Not all of those songs will ultimately become big hits—but listeners tend to reject those songs rapidly. It would behoove Pop music radio to play those songs while listeners are interested in hearing them.

2. Listeners’ interest in most songs is highest when the song is in its first 20 weeks. That’s consistent with what pre-pandemic era callout showed before changes in music consumption and research methodology slowed it significantly. Throughout the 2010s, listeners would increasingly say they were tired of hearing big Pop hits after they were 20 weeks old.

3. Those songs you’re sick of? Fans keep requesting them for years. From Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and even the weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” the songs that listeners know and love most in radio research and that streaming users keep streaming forever are also songs listeners keep requesting month after month and even year after year.

Liveline’s Top 20 requests are a valuable data point because—unlike streaming data which measures plays—requests measure how many individual people request a song. Additionally—unlike callout—requests capture passion for songs when it peaks, not merely when a song achieves universal familiarity.

Why do they call?

You might wonder why anyone would call a radio show to hear their favorite song when that song is a few clicks away in their pocket.

It’s not about hearing the song.

It’s about having a voice in the show. It’s the thrill of hearing your voice on the radio. (Yes, people still feel like celebrities when they’re on the radio.) It’s about being a part of a community.

Even back in the day when we recorded our favorite songs from the radio onto cassettes, it was about these things.

After all, a good radio personality is a star. The best radio personalities make you feel like a star.

Data Sources for this article:

• Liveline Top 20 requests, retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/livelineradio/

• Coleman Insights’ Integr8 USA Pop Top 3, provided by RAMP: Radio and Music Pros, https://ramp247.com and retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/colemaninsights

• Spotify Charts (2025-2026 for the USA): https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us

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When Elvis Presley passed in 1977, record stores sold out of their remaining copies of old Presley albums within hours. His contemporary single “way down”, which had already peaked at #31 on the Billboard Hot 100 and had fallen to #53, did rebound upon his death, but only to #16.

John Lennon had just released his latest album Double Fantasy on December 8^th, 1980. It sold modestly, until Lennon’s assassination that night catapulted the album and its lead single “(Just Like) Starting Over” to #1 in the U.S. and the U.K.

Both Presley and Lennon died unexpectedly. Both Presley and Lennon had current hits on the Hot 100 at the time of their deaths, the sales of which Billboard charted.

What we didn’t know is how often fans went back and listened to those old records from their favorite artists upon learning they had left us, especially for legendary artists whose hitmaking years were behind them.

In today’s streaming era, we do know.

Legendary artists with short-lived streaming tributes

Tina Turner is universally respected for escaping Rock ‘n’ Roll’s most infamous abusive marriage and professional partnership, as well as her unexpected 1980s comeback. When Turner left us in 2023, two of her songs emerged on the Spotify 200 the day after her death. Those two songs accounted for only 1% of the day’s Spotify 200 streams and were gone from the chart the following day.

Later that year, Jimmy Buffet stepped on life’s Pop Top. Buffet is more polarizing than Turner: Parrot heads don’t merely love his music; they long for its lifestyle. Detractors find his music and subculture it created shallow and kitschy.

The day following his passing, 11 of his biggest solo hits and collaborations appeared among Spotify’s 200 most-played songs in the U.S., accounting for 6% of all Spotify 200 streams that day. Even his biggest hit, “Margaritaville,” reached #6 on Spotify that day, but slid out of Spotify’s chart after only three more days.

Many other artists’ passing, from Little Richard to Rush’s Neil Peart, to Toby Keith, failed to launch any of their songs into the Spotify 200.

Dolly Parton smashes streaming records

If you want to understand perceptions of your brand, examine how people make fun of you…

Streaming on Spotify in the U.S. reflected our universal love for Dolly.

When news broke of Dolly Parton’s death on Tuesday afternoon, August 25^th, 2026, fans began streaming her songs instantly: Even though half the day was already over in most of the U.S., “Jolene” and “9 to 5” garnered enough streams during the rest of the day to be the #2 and #3 most-streamed songs on Spotify in the U.S. “Islands In the Stream” reached #8.

The following day, those three songs would be Spotify’s Top three songs, a first for an artist’s passing in the streaming era.

Overall, 15 Dolly Parton classics reached the Spotify 200 the day after her death, Fans collectively played those songs almost 12 million times—that’s 13% of all streams in the Spotify 200 for the day. That’s the highest of any artist’s death in the streaming era.

A week and a half later, “Jolene” was still #30 in the Spotify 200.

A week after her death, Dolly’s #1 hit “9 to 5” surpassed “Jolene” and its streams began growing again. On Friday, August 4^, 2026, it was still #19.

There’s another artist whose death generated substantial tribute streaming who might surprise you.

The second biggest death of the streaming era

Ozzy Osbourne also left us on a Tuesday. The following Wednesday, July 23, 2025, 16 of his solo songs, collaborations, and Black Sabbath classics reached the Spotify 200. That’s one more song than Dolly Parton, but with slightly fewer total plays. Additionally, while “Crazy Train” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” reached the Top 10, they peaked at #7 and #9, respectively.

Osbourne fans would keep “Crazy Train” in the Spotify 200 for almost three weeks, far surpassing Jimmy Buffet’s tribute streams. However, it spent the last two of those weeks below #40.

In comparison, “9 to 5” (and Jolene) not only peaked higher than did “Crazy Train,” fans played “9 to 5” more often than did “Crazy Train” a week later.

It might seem surprising that Osbourne’s death generated more streaming than Jimmy Buffet, Tina Turner, or Toby Keith. Between making Heavy Metal a genre with Black Sabbath in the 1970s, scoring Album Rock hits as a solo artist in the 1980s, launching the Heavy Metal tour Ozzfest in the 1990s, and becoming a TV celebrity with The Osbournes in the 2000s, Ozzy remined relevant for generations.

Appealing to fans from nine to 98 is exactly why Dolly set streaming records upon her death.

Doly Parton on the Hot 100

Now that the vast majority of music consumption happens on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, tribute streaming is now directly reflected on the Hot 100.

In 1974, “Jolene” was Parton’s second #1 as a solo artist on the Billboard Country chart. Despite the song’s appeal today, “Jolene” had little impact beyond Country. On the Hot 100, it debuted at #92 and only reached #60.

For the chart week ending September 5th, 2026, “Jolene” re-entered the Hot 100 52 years later at #16. It’s one of five Parton songs charting again on the Hot 100 after her death and it’s the highest of the five:

“9 to 5” was already a #1 Pop hit in 1980, also reaching #1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary and Hot Country charts. It re-entered the Hot 100 at #18.

Other Parton songs that re-entered the Hot 100 thanks to fans streaming them include:

• “Islands in the Stream”, her #1 duet with Kenny Rogers, re-entering at #26

• “I Will Always Love You” debuted at #27. It’s the song’s first time on the Hot 100.

• “Here You Come Again” which re-entered at #44. It originally peaked at #3 on the Hot 100, #2 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and #1 on the Billboard Hot Country chart in 1977.

Back when honoring our lost artists involved pulling out those old albums, we simply had no way to track that tribute listening.

The Future of Tribute Streaming

Now that we can track it, we can sadly expect to see new record-setting tribute streaming in coming years. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Smokey Robinson are all in their eighties. Phil Collins and Elton John are in their seventies. Willie Nelson is 93.

It’s fathomable that Paul McCarnety’s passing could cause The Beatles to posthumously repeat their 1964 feat of owning the Top 5 slots on the Billboard Hot 100.

Let’s enjoy the music while they’re all still with us.

Data sources for this article

• Daily Spotify Charts (2019-2026 for the USA): https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us

• The Billboard Hot 100: https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

Why songs this report calls “Recurrents” are really still Currents, “Sue Me” stages a comeback, and five songs CHR needs to give up.

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Tame Impala’s “Loser” shows how radio still makes songs hits. Country and Alterative crossover hits abound. Plus, is Steve Lacy moving beyond his Gen Z fan base?

Here are resources to get you ready to use The Hit Momentum Newsletter:

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Right now, there are more people listening to this station than the #1 radio station in Chicago.

Its logo is so iconic, it shows up in memes.

It has a personality so adored by its audience that when she briefly disappeared, listeners were emotionally distraught.

It has a community where fans of the station interact and even support each other through tough times.

The New York Times has even written about this radio station.

So why have you likely never heard it?

Technically, it’s not a radio station. It’s a YouTube channel called Lofi Girl.

Lofi Girl’s main video is a 24/7 live stream called “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to”. The channel has almost 16-million YouTube subscribers. Between 30,000 and 60,000 listeners are streaming it at any given moment. It’s the creation of France’s Dimitri Somogyi, a.k.a. ChlledCow, who also runs the music label that crafts the songs.

What is Lofi?

True to the name, the stream plays Lofi Hip Hop—or simply Lofi—a style of instrumental music that merges hip hop beats with slow and simple melodies and ambient sounds into hypnotic but non-obtrusive music. It’s intentionally and unapologetically background music, intended to help you “relax” or “study.”

Don’t let the Hip Hop moniker fool you. While the beats are from that genre, there’s no rap—or any words—in Lofi Hip Hop. Its vibes are more Kenny G than Kendrick Lamar.

The genre is so intentional in its purpose of blending into the background that the music avoids very low base and very high treble, focusing on the 200Hz to 10kHz range—hence the “Lofi” name. The idea is that since fans are listening on headphones, limiting the frequency response of the music will better blend the beats the listener hears in their headphones with the random and distracting noises in their environment.

Lofi also leaves in imperfections, from beats that aren’t always on beat to ambient noise. For such a minimalist music style, it is those imperfections that give the music character. This isn’t AI generated. Real musicians craft this music.

Does a radio station meticulously designed to help you relax sound familiar?

Jim Shulke and the Pursuit of Perfected Relaxation

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll likely recall your dad, grandma, or aunt listening to a “Beautiful Music” station. Also called “Easy Listening” or, derogatorily, “Elevator Music,” they played lush, inoffensive instrumental versions of popular songs that were the soundtrack to your dentist appointments. At its peak in the 1970s, the local Beautiful Music station was often the #1 station in town.

And while he didn’t invent Beautiful Music, one man did more for the meticulous musical engineering of its relaxing mood; Jim Shulke.

A Harvard MBA and advertising executive, Shulke theorized that if he could sequence songs together in such a way that it felt like one never-ending performance, listeners would stay tuned in hour after hour. He didn’t own or manage any radio stations. Instead, his company, Stereo Radio Productions (SRP), provided all the music on reel-to-reel tapes for client stations. Shulke carefully built playlists in 15-minute increments using “matched flow sequencing,” in which music would flow from slow to (relatively) upbeat back to slow.

Here’s how it sounded on the air at its peak on Philadelphia’s WWSH FM 106:

But Shulke’s obsessiveness went far beyond crafting playlists.

• He demanded stations tweak their frequency response based on ratings. Fewer men tuning in? Add more low-end bass. Female ratings down? Roll off the treble frequencies to eliminate distortion.

• At a time when radio regularly aired 18 minutes of commercials an hour, Shulke’s clients could only air 6 minutes an hour. The audio for those commercials had to be -6dB lower than the music, so as not to jar the listener the way TV notoriously does.

• Local announcers were carefully chosen to sound soft and unobtrusive, with each word carefully scripted.

• Stations had call letters that spelled out words; WWSH was “Wish.” WLYF was “Life”. WPCH was “Peach.”

This obsessive attention to continuously flowing music with scientifically engineered frequency response is eerily similar to today’s Lofi.

What’s different about Lofi is the listeners’ demographics. From Shulke’s Easy Listening to Smooth Jazz to the Yacht Rock revival, it’s always been older listeners attracted to relaxing music.

However, Lofi’s audience is almost exclusively Gen Z listeners in their teens and early 20s. It’s their parents, in fact, who are lambasting the genre, as in this New Yorker article that called it Apathetic Music to Make Spreadsheets To.

Why are kids embracing an Easy Listening genre?

Kids These Days

It makes sense when you understand today’s teens and young adults.

Generation Z’s childhood has seen financial uncertainty, political divisiveness, climate fears, war in Europe, multiple wars in the Middle East, the onslaught of AI threatening their job prospects, and a deadly pandemic. For college bound teens, choosing the wrong school—where a degree’s earning potential can’t pay off the massive student loan debt—is a financial life and death decision.

As generational historian Neil Howe highlights in his latest book, while we Generation X teens craved more freedom from a society with stifling structure, today’s teens are craving security from a society with crumbling structure.

No wonder they’re embracing music that takes the edge off.

What Lofi Girl can Teach Us About Radio’s Future

Lofi Hip Hop Radio’s music is accompanied by an animated image of a girl studying while wearing headphones. She writes, sips tea, and does other things her listeners are likely doing, too. In 2023, she disappeared from her room. It turned out to be a part of an elaborate promotional stunt to launch a new side channel playing synth beats for gamers, but listeners were genuinely distraught that something bad happened to her.

Remember, she’s an animated picture.

There’s a chat window for listeners to comment and connect with each other. While it’s mostly fans saying hi to each other, listeners sometimes offer each other real support and encouragement during difficult times.

A well-defined music format, beloved personality, promotional events, and a sense of community and belonging: These are the elements that make great radio stations.

Lofi Girl’s success should be encouragement to any radio programmer who believes radio is about sharing carefully curated music and building community—not towers in fields.

Further information:

• the science behind lofi music:

• The Beautiful Music Radio Format: An insider’s Perspective
  By Dennis R. Ciapura: http://www.kratoville.com/jackjr/rise_and_fall.html

• The Museum of Broadcast Communications, “The Beautiful Music format”: https://www.museum.tv/portfolio-2/easy-listening/beautiful-music-format

• Radio Automation … circa 1974!: https://marlintaylor.com/radio/radio-automation-circa-1974/

Why Justin Bieber shouldn’t be in heavy rotation—and the two songs that should be Currents. Plus, the Audrey Hobert song that’s making a comeback.

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As a lifelong radio fanatic, I pick on my beloved medium a lot for sticking with the same old songs too long. (I discussed why poorly implemented research is a big part of that problem in this article.) Songs are staying around so long now that Billboard recently changed their rules to get squatters off the Hot 100.

There’s just one problem with blaming radio for today’s forever lingering tunes.

On streaming services, where fans are in control of their music, those fans are increasingly picking the same old songs over newer releases, too.

Today, we’re analyzing how long songs stay on the Spotify 200 chart in the U.S. and how it’s changed from 2019 through today. The change isn’t subtle.

How Long Do Songs Stay On The Spotify 200

The time the typical song spends among Spotify’s 200 most-played songs has more than doubled since 2019. Back then, the typical song only spent half a year on the Spotify 200 chart. Today, a typical song stays in the Top 200 for well over a year.

If we zoom in on the biggest hits—those songs that reach the Top 10 most-played songs on Spotify—the increase is even more dramatic. Back in 2019, the typical Spotify 10 stayed in the Top 10 for only 10 weeks. Today, it’s almost half a year.

That timeframe increased steadily every year---except 2024. That’s the year when Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help,”, “Not Like Us” from Kendrick Lamar, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy), and Chappel Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” were all massive hits on both radio and Spotify. With so many mass-appeal hits vying for listeners’ play buttons, Spotify’s Top 10 turned over faster than it has ever since.

There’s wide variation on just how long an individual song stays a Top 200 hit on Spotify. Overall for 2019 through today, over a third of all songs are only Top 200 for one week. Most of these songs are album tracks from mid-tier artists that fans sample when the album releases, but don’t stream in subsequent weeks. Most spend their lone week in the Spotify 200 far closer to #200 than #1. Overall, only seven percent of all songs that reach the Spotify 200 stay there for over a year.

When we examine the songs that generate the most streams, however, almost half of the streams of songs reaching the Spotify 200 are for songs that stay in the Spotify 200 for a year or longer. That means about half of the Spotify streams for Top 200 songs come from only seven percent of the songs in the Spotify 200. That also means Spotify makes their money from the songs you never stop streaming.

When we focus on those songs that peak in the Spotify 200’s Top 10, the most likely outcome (one-in five) is for that song to stay in the Spotify 200 for one to two years.

Finally, let’s examine the extremes year by year, specifically, the percentage of songs that only spend a week in the Spotify 200 versus how many songs stay in the Spotify 200 for a year or longer. From 2020 through 2025, the percentage of one week only songs fell by 37%, while the percentage of 1+ years songs almost doubled:

Three Reasons Fans are Streaming Songs Longer

Demographics: Back in 2019, primarily teens and younger adults used Spotify. The younger you are, the more time you typically devote to new music. Subsequently, the faster you move through your favorite new songs. During the pandemic, older adults embraced music streaming. Those 30- to 49-year-olds who are now on Spotify take longer to get to know new songs—and longer to get sick of them—than do 12- to 29-year-old listeners.

The Current Music Slump: So far, the 2020’s have not exactly been a golden age for contemporary hit music. When new songs fail to excite, folks keep playing the older songs they know and love. When we do have a bright spot for mass-appeal popular music, as we had in the Spring of 2024, the songs we stream most do indeed rotate faster.

Songs Designed for Streaming: While it’s the smallest and hardest to quantify, another reason songs are staying on the Spotify 200 longer is that music creators now understand how to maximize a song’s streaming performance. From release strategies to how the song itself is crafted, music makers now think first about maximizing streaming, not CD sales or radio exposure.

It’s not the biggest hits that fans keep playing forever.

The biggest hits aren’t always the longest lasting songs

The chart below shows the 25 most-streamed songs on Spotify from 2019 through today (left), compared to the 25 songs that stayed in the Spotify 200 the longest (right). Only nine of the 25 songs are the same.

Among the nine leaders in both total streams and chart longevity are big hits from the past decade, such as Post Malone & Swae Lee’s “Sunflower” and Morgan Wallen’s “Whiskey Glasses,” Gen Z favorites including Tyler, The Creator & Kali Uchis’ “See You Again,” and enduring classics like Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and “Mr. Brightside” from The Killers.

Among the 25 most-played songs are many more of the decade’s biggest hits, including Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves”, The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” and Espresso from Sabrina Carpenter.

Among the longest lasting songs that are not among the most-streamed songs are lots of titles from Hip Hop artists with rapid fan bases, including Juice WRLD, XXXTENTACION, and Kendrick Lamar. There’s also younger Country starts with rabid fans, including Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” and Luke Combs’ “Beautiful Crazy.”

Why are so many of the biggest hits not among the songs that fans stream forever? Simple: Fans eventually got tired of them and stopped playing them nearly as often as they did when they were big hits.

Familiarity still eventually breeds contempt.

It’s a timeless trait that radio is wise to remember.

Need help knowing when songs are in the sweet spot between familiarity and contempt? My day job can help…

Data Source for this article:

Spotify Charts (weeks of 1/1/2019 through 7/30/2026 for the USA): https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us

Here are resources to get you ready to use The Hit Momentum Newsletter:

• Quick Use Guide: You just want to know how to read and implement the report ASAP

• Complete Guide: Here, you’ll learn in detail what the report shows you and why behind our recommendations on how to use it.

Read more

Here are resources to get you ready to use The Hit Momentum Newsletter:

• Quick Use Guide: You just want to know how to read and implement the report ASAP

• Complete Guide: Here, you’ll learn in detail what the report shows you and why behind our recommendations on how to use it.

Read more

In 2025, something happened on the billboard Hot 100 that has never happened since the chart’s birth in 1958: Every Top 10 song was from an artist from the same generation, namely the Millennial Generation.

In June of 2024, Eminem became the last aging Gen Xer to reach the Top 10 at age 51 with “Houdini,” a song radio swore was a hit, but fans flatly rejected.

As of August 2026, no true Generation Z artist has reached the Hot 100’s Top 10. So far, the youngest artist to reach the Hot 100’s Top 10 is Sombr, born July 25^th, 2005.

“But Matt,” I hear you shouting, “Plenty of Generation Z artists born after 1997 have hit the Top 10.”

Ahh, but where did this 1997 dividing line come from? Not from the experts who invented the name “Millennials.”

Straus/Howe Generational Theory

I rely on historians Neil Howe and his late partner William Strauss to define when each generation starts and ends. Their seminal work, Generations: The History of America’s Future, not only invented the term Millennial, it also predicted “The Crisis of 2020” – in a book they wrote in 1991!

I dive deep into their work in The Generational Music Theorem. For now, just know that they define generational cohorts a bit differently than you might see elsewhere:

• Boomers were born between 1943 and 1960, a few years earlier than the postwar birthrate boom. If you faintly remember World War II, you’re from the previous Silent Generation.

• Xers were born from 1961 to 1981, which starts a few years before the baby bust the birth control pill spawned. If you can at least faintly recall the Kennedy Assassination, you’re actually a Boomer. If you’re too young to recall the Challenger explosion, you’re a Millennial.

• Millennials stem from 1982 to 2005. That’s later than some cite, but consistent with the typical length of a generation Straus and Howe’s research finds throughout America’s history.

• Generation Z emerged in 2006, according to Niel Howe’s latest book “The Fourth Turning.” If you’re old enough to remember a time before the Great Financial Crisis and the Obama administration, you’re a Millennial. If you can’t, you’re Gen Z. (Howe labeled this cohort “The Homeland Generation” before the generation itself embraced Generation Z.) Generation Alpha is simply a term today’s high schoolers invented to separate themselves from embarrassing six-seven-loving middle schoolers.

Here’s a summary of each generation, including their major recording artists and U.S. Presidents.

Generations Mix It Up on the Chart

Throughout chart history, at least two generations are crafting Top 10 hits.

Consider the early 2000s: Generation X artists dominated the chart, including The Backstreet Boys, Eminem, and Matchbox Twenty. Just as aging Boomer artists such as Madonna were finally ceding the Top 10, however, Millennials began scoring Top 10 hits. By 2008, Xers like Flo Rida and Millennials such as Rihanna were equally represented in the Top 10.

Or consider 1981. Boomers such as Rod Stewart, Diana Ross, and Blondie dominated the Top 10. However, Silent generation icons such as John Lennon and Smokey Robinson still scored hits and Tina Turner was about to have a major comeback. Meanwhile, Xer artists Culture Club and Wham! were waiting to replace those Silent icons. By the late 1980s, Xer artists such as Guns N’ Roses and Janet Jackson surpassed Boomer artists in the Top 10, but Silent legend Roy Orbison could still top the charts.

From the Hot 100’s inception in 1958 all the way through 2024, at least two generations are contributing hits to the Top 10. Even when one generation dominates the Top 10, such as Boomers in 1981 or Xers in 2000, a few gaining icons from the previous generation and a few fresh faces from the younger generation reached the Hot 100’s Top 10.

So how is it that Millennials have fully owned the Top 10 for two years now?

It’s a matter of age:

The typical age of a hitmaker

Historically, the typical age of a Top 10 hitmaker is 28.5 years old. About a third of Top 10s are from 25- to 29-year-olds, 38% are from artists 30 and older, while 28% are from artists 24 and younger.

The average age does change throughout the years and with different generations. The all-time oldest year was 1981, when the typical Top 10 hit was from a 34-year-old, followed by 1985 at 33.2 years old. However, the second oldest era is now: In 2025, the average Top 10 hitmaker was just over 32 years old

With boomers, it’s generational: During the years they dominated the Top 10, the typical Top 10 artist’s age was 31.2, higher than any other generation’s dominant era.

For Millennial hitmakers, however, it’s only a recent phenomenon. Until the early 2020s, Millennial artists were of comparable age to the Xers that dominated before them, specifically 27 years old. Suddenly in 2022. However, the average age jumped to 32-years-old.

Almost half of the Top 10 hitmakers in 2025 were 30-to 34-years-old, five years older than the 25- to 29-year-old age range that typically is the largest plurality in the Top 10.

As for the lack of Gen Z artists, no teenaged artist has scored a Top 10 hit since Gayle took “abcdefu” to #3 in March 2022. Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo started as teen wonders and were still teens for their 2021 hits, but they’re now 24 and 23, respectively.

Throughout the 2020s, artists have simply aged in place, with few younger artists emerging to take their place.

That’s largely the fault of who is picking the hits, namely, aging Millennials.

Generation Z began influencing which artists score Top 10 hits: Starting with Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish in 2019 and continuing with Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan, and Chappel Roan this decade, A few Millennial artists that primarily appeal to Gen Z fans have successfully dominated streaming and radio.

Other Gen Z favorites, however, such as Steve Lacy, Tyler, the Creator, and Gigi Perez, have top tier hits on streaming, but have been largely absent from Top 40 FM radio, largely keeping them out of the Hot 100’s Top 10.

Radio may no longer play the hits first, but it still validates which hits are the biggest.

Instead, aging millennial icons such as Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Drake, and Miley Cyrus, alongside traditional Pop creators such as Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams, fill the airwaves.

A major factor is that radio increasingly ignores the tastes of listeners in their early- to mid-20s. There’s logic there. Generation Z simply doesn’t spend nearly as much time with FM radio as do older generations, so FM radio programmers are increasingly focusing their music research on the tastes of Millennials in their late 20s, 30s, and early 40s.

Three songs in particular have cumulatively spent years in the Hot 100’s Top 10 this year because of radio’s aging audience research: Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control,” Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary.”

Gen Z’s Streaming Hits

Consider Malcom Todd’s “Earrings” It’s consistently been among the most streamed songs on Spotify in the U.S. It’s 29 weeks old (for the chart date ending July 23, 2026), and is still #2 on the Spotify 200, behind only “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley.

What will break this stronghold of aging Millennials?

Historically, we experience a resurgence in mass-appeal hit music when an emerging generation turns 21 and becomes the dominant generation consuming contemporary music—and thereby becoming the generation picking the hits. It happened before:

• In 1983 when Gen X tastes replaced Boomers, replacing Christopher Cross and Air Supply with Michael Jackson and New Wave.

• In 1964 when the Beatles led the British invasion. Those screaming teens at the Ed Sullivan Theatre were Boomers, and their tastes suddenly made the Silent Generation’s sounds obsolete.

• In 2003, when Millennials had finally had enough of Generation X’s biting reality: They rejected 90s-style gangster rap and ushered in fun-clubbing Crunk.

If Straus and Howe correctly pegged the first birthyear for the new generation’s cohorts as 2006, Generation Z’s moment to pick the hits will finally emerge in 2027.

The bigger question will be if radio will be ready to play more Malcom Todd and less Ales Warren.

This article is brought to you by my day job…

Data sources for this article:

• The Billboard Hot 100: https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

• Wikipedia’s Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 singles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_top-ten_singles

Here are resources to get you ready to use The Hit Momentum Newsletter:

• Quick Use Guide: You just want to know how to read and implement the report ASAP

• Complete Guide: Here, you’ll learn in detail what the report shows you and why behind our recommendations on how to use it.

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