You’re driving around in your new Dodge Neon digging the tunes: "Truly Madly Deeply" from Savage Garden, Shania Twain’s "You're Still the One", "Too Close" from Next, "and that big movie tearjerker that you’d work years to forget, “My Heart Will Go On" from Celine Dion.
Those songs were among 1998’s biggest songs of the year, according to the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles chart. In 1998, 25% of the data that crowned those songs typically came from sales of cassettes and CDs, while the remaining 75% came from radio airplay. At no other point in Hot 100 chart history was radio more influential in a song’s fortunes than in the late 1990s.
In 2024, that Neon is long recycled. You haven’t thought of Titanic’s theme song in years. (Sorry about that.) These days, your soundtrack in your Honda CR-V Hybrid includes Teddy Swims’ "Lose Control", "Espresso" from Sabrina Carpenter, your kids playing Kendrick Lamar’s "Not Like Us,” and everybody at the bar playing "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" from Shaboozey.
Radio still helped declare these songs 2024’s official champions. Physical sales are long gone, though, and even paid digital downloads now have a minuscule role in a song’s Hot 100 ranking. The biggest metric making these songs hits is—duh—their streaming plays. By the early 2020s, it’s estimated the typical song on the on the Hot 100 got there based on a scant 2% from digital song sales and only 25% from radio airplay, with 73% based on streaming,
As streaming music has become a mainstream activity and as listeners—especially teens and young adults—spend less time with radio, which music consumption method truly reflects the songs most popular with everyday Americans?
Along with the Hot 100’s Year End Chart that I analyzed in my last post, Billboard also publishes year end charts of the biggest songs on each of the Hot 100’s contributing music sources; streaming, paid digital downloads, and radio.
What I discovered will likely be disconcerting to my many radio programming friends.
The Streaming Era Begins with Hip Hop Fans
2017 marks the transition year when subscribing to Spotify or Apple Music to stream your favorite songs aggressively surpassed buying those songs on iTunes.
The graph below shows what styles of songs comprised Billboard’s year end charts for 2017 for streaming, radio, and paid digital downloads, as well as the overall Hot 100 year end charts that combine data from these three media. (Note we’re only evaluating the five major English language music styles; I’m excluding Spanish-language genres and Christmas tunes.)
Back in 2017, streaming was clearly the outlier. Hip Hop and Rhythmic/R&B titles dominated the most-streamed songs of 2017. Pop was dramatically underplayed on streaming. Country was practically non-existent.
Meanwhile, radio and paid digital downloads (which folks still did in 2017) reflected more balanced music tastes—as also reflected in the Hot 100’’s overall hits of 2017.
2024: Streaming is mainstream. Is Radio?
Fast forward to this past year. The most-streamed songs of 2024 now include Pop and Country. Hip Hop no longer dominates. Meanwhile, radio is the outlier, with half as many Hip Hop hits as the overall Top 100 songs of the year, plus more Country titles than other media.
Compared to the overall Hot 100, radio was the outlier in 2024, not streaming.
How did we get here?
Pop Fans Embrace Streaming Gradually
To establish a baseline, the next graph shows the genres of the biggest hits overall on the Hot 100’s year end charts from 2017 through 2024. Hip Hop was huge in the late 2010s. However, why did it suddenly drop in 2022?
Let’s drill down to Billboard’s year end charts for streaming: In 2022, the percentage of Hip Hop titles among the year’s most streamed songs fell by almost half compared to 2021. Meanwhile, Pop surged in 2022.
Hip Hop fans were the first group to switch to streaming music en mass in the mid/late 2010s. Pop and Country fans were still sticking with iTunes and their favorite local radio station for their music. Pop fans would slowly migrate to streaming in the late 2010s and then accelerated switching to streaming in the early 2020s. Undoubtedly, the pandemic—pushing many to trade long car commutes for home offices—pushed many to embrace streaming.
Pop fans reached critical mass among streaming users in 2022.
That meant Hip Hop fans—who had already moved to streaming—no longer dominated. When evaluating percentages—which mathematically have to add up to 100%—the mass influx of Taylor Swift fans inherently makes Drake fans count less.
Hip Hop titles had already been garnering the lions share of their contribution to the overall Hot 100 from streaming. Therefore, when they no longer dominated streaming platforms, Hip Hop ultimately also had fewer top songs among 2022’s biggest hits.
Country Fans Embrace Streaming Suddenly
While Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift fans were gradually quitting iTunes for Spotify, Country fans remained largely absent from Streaming biggest songs. In 2019, not a single Country title was among Billboard’s most streamed songs of the year, despite plenty of Country titles among the songs folks bought most on iTunes and listeners to on the radio.
Unlike Pop fans, who gradually migrated to Streaming, Country fans jumped platforms suddenly in 2022.
A new breed of Country performers including Zach Bryan, Chris Stapleton, and Jelly Roll found an audience on streaming outside of the Nashville Industrial Complex, where labels work more closely with radio than in any other genre. However, not artist found more streaming success appealing to a young audience than Morgan Wallen.
By 2024, Country fans had parity with Pop and Hip Hop fans on streaming platforms.
Radio Becomes the Anomaly
Streaming, once dominated by Hip Hop & R&B fans, is now a mainstream and mass-appeal new music source. While it still favors younger listeners in their teens, 20s and 30s, it does accurately reflect the tastes of those teens and younger adults who have always been in the age group most interested in new music.
Where does that leave radio?
In 2024, it appears radio’s contemporary-formatted stations no longer reflected America as they always have.
Consider Hip Hip. There were naturally fewer Hip Hop songs on radio compared to streaming back when Hip Hop fans owned streaming. During that time, the share of Hip Hop songs on radio’s biggest songs of the year closely mirrored the share of Hip Hop titles most bought on iTunes.
In 2024, however, 26% of the biggest songs of the year overall were Hip Hop. The percentage of Hip Hop songs folks still bought on iTunes increased over last year. On radio? Hip Hop’s share of radio’s biggest hits of the year fell to 13%.
Let’s examine the data another way.
The graph below shows the percentage of Hip Hop songs in the Hot 100’s year end chart each year on the left. Each graph to the left then shows how Streaming, Digital Downloads, and radio performed in comparison to the Hot 100.
If the difference is positive, more Hip Hop titles were among the year’s biggest hits on that platform compared to the overall year-end hits.
f the difference is negative, fewer Hip Hop titles were among the year’s biggest hits compared to the Hot 100’s year end list.
2023 was the first year Hip Hop actually under performed on slightly on streaming, while in 2024, Hip Hop had the same share of the year’s biggest hits on streaming as on the overall Hot 100 year end chart.
Meanwhile in 2024, Radio became the outlier, with 13 percentage points fewer Hip Hop hits than the overall year end chart. (Yes, that difference is less than it was in 2017-2021. However, those years were still the era when Hip Hop dominated streaming.)
Consider Country: You can see how dramatically Country fans fully embraced streaming in 2024: It’s the first year in history Country songs are not under-represented among the most streamed songs compared to overall biggest songs of the year.
It’s logical that Country would be over-represented on radio until 2022: Country fans weren’t yet streaming en-mass, instead getting their fix form their local Country stations. In 2024, however, with Country fans now using streaming on par with other genre fans, radio’s Country share—which logically should have held steady or decreased—actually further increased.
Finally, let’s examine Pop consumption. Unlike Country, whose fans seemingly embraced streaming overnight in the last two years, you can clearly see how Pop fans gradually began streaming, finally reaching parity in 2022.
Historically, radio has leaned into Pop. Even if its not your favorite style, it’s most everybody’s second favorite. Pop is the glue that bonds Hip Hop, Country, and Rock partisans together in a way no other style of music does. For a medium that succeeds by playing songs lots of folks know and love, it’s logical Pop would play a bigger role on radio than on Spotify or iTunes.
In 2024, however, there were slightly fewer Pop songs among radio’s biggest hits of the year compared to the overall Hot 100.
Mathematically, the reason is Country, as noted above.
Part of the reason is audience figures. Billboard doesn’t simply evaluate how many times radio stations play a song; it actually evaluates the estimated number of listeners who heard each song on the radio. With Country stations performing well in the ratings, their plays will naturally count more. Sam Hunt’s “Outskirts” and Cody Johnson “Dirt Cheap” have Country radio to thank for their consumption.
Another reason is 2024’s blockbuster Country crossover hits. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, “I Had Some Help” from Post Malone and Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs “Fast Car” remake, Dasha’s “Austin” and Jelly Roll’s “Need a Favor” were big hits on Top 40 and Adult Contemporary Pop stations. More stations playing your song means more radio exposure for Billboard to capture.
Has Radio Become Too Cautious?
Beyond Country’s strong appeal, however, a major factor is a highly conservative approach to selection songs for radio in 2024:
There are huge Hip Hop hits that Top 40 stations generally ignored: For weeks, 21 Savage’s “Redrum” streamed like a Pop hit, but proved too out there for Pop radio. By the time CHR embraced Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” it was already months old among its core fans.
Even traditional Pop hits were absent from radio. Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” became a widespread cultural phenomenon without major Top 40 stations playing it. Gen Z favorites, including “I Like the Way You Kiss Me” from Artemas aand Mitski‘s “My Love Mine All Mine,” were big hits on streaming for months, but rarely on the radio.
“It’s Not Radio, it’s The Charts”
Some of my favorite fellow chart geeks will argue—with logical evidence—that since streaming data dominates the Hot 100,, the chart no longer reflects the songs Americans most love as it did in Casey Kasem’s day.
First, let’s remember that Billboard never intended the Hot 100 to track how many people know and like a song: The chart measures music consumption. When Megan Thee Stallion’s "HISS" was #1, it wasn’t the song Americans all knew and loved, but it was played more times than any other song that week. (I created The Hit Momentum Report to help professional programmers mitigate this very issue in streaming data.)
What chart geeks can no longer argue, however, is that streaming music users are a weird subgroup that doesn’t look like the rest of America’s contemporary music consumers.
If radio stations continue favoring the old and familiar over the new and culturally relevant… If hit music stations focus on the tastes of 38 year olds and ignore 23 year olds… If hit music stations leave the contemporary format entirely in favor of yesterday’s throwbacks, then radio being the anomaly in 2024 won’t be an anomaly for radio.
Data sources for this post:
Billboard Year End Charts - Hot 100 Songs: https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/hot-100-songs/
Billboard Year End Charts - Streaming Songs https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2024/streaming-songs/
Billboard Year End Charts - Digital Song Sales: https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2024/digital-songs/
Billboard Year End Charts - Radio Songs: https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2024/radio-songs
I drive my teens and all their friends around daily and as soon as they get in the car, someone will take control of the AUX and stream music. No one listens to radio.
Great article. As a mentor of 18 to 22 year old (former foster) young folks...I have to echo that they never listen to the radio. Often with little money the priority goes to (at least) one streaming service. Social Media will often be both of our link to our favorite artists new releases or just songs. One of the youth the other day was excited to have me listen to a couple songs he just heard that were his new favorites...of course I was expecting rap or metal but he played me Matthew Wilders Break My Stride and Bobby Caldwells What You Won't Do for Love. I showed him both of my 45rpms...and we had a fun conversation. (Sorry spilled coffee on my keyboard...some of my punctuation keys are not working today.)