Hot Hits Summer? More like Hot Hits Bummer
Despite reasons for optimism about the state of Pop music, listeners are playing this summer's hits a lot less often than they played last summer's bangers.
Call me old-fashioned.
In this age when seemingly no one agrees about anything, I get excited when a pop song becomes so widely popular, you simply can’t avoid it: The kind of song where you mention a lyric on your social media and everybody gets the reference. The kind of song where they play it between innings and everybody at the ballpark sings along.
Pundits have long predicted the internet would kill all artifacts of a monoculture as we sought out and found music that spoke to us individually. And yet, 30 years after the advent of audio streaming, you can mention, “everybody at the bar getting’ tipsy,” and anyone too young to relocate to a Del Web community gets the reference.
From Kendrick Lamar’s insightful Drake takedown to Chappell Roan calling out a lover in denial, last summer gave us several songs that became cultural touch points.
Is that streak still with us?
Radio programming icon Guy Zapoleon notes that America’s hit music stations are finally re-embracing new music and playing fewer Throwbacks to make up for a lack of new hits everybody love.
Mason Kelter, host of the nationally syndicated request-driven evening radio show LiveLine, observes that radio is playing more of the same hits that people are playing for themselves on streaming—and requesting those songs on his show.
Unfortunately, examining how often folks are playing the hits for themselves makes me less optimistic than Guy and Mason.
Music fans simply aren’t as impressed with 2025’s biggest new songs are they were with the this we had in 2024. Why? People are playing this summer’s biggest hits significantly less often on streaming than they did last summer.
The graph below shows the total number of streams for every song on the Spotify 200 every week from January 2024 through mid-July 2025. You’ll notice two peaks you can ignore; 1) the surprisingly short-lived spike when Taylor Swift released The Tortured Poets Department and 2) Christmas music during December. Ignoring those spikes, notice that the overall streaming level has steadily slid since the summer of 2024?
Let’s rearrange this data so we can compare 2024 and 2025 more clearly: This graph shows the total weekly plays of every song on the Spotify 200 by month from January through July. For January through March, people were streaming about the same amount of music this year as they did last year. For May, June, and July, however, people are playing the 200 biggest songs on Spotify 28% less often compared to last year. .
And since Graphs About Songs is all about putting too fine a point on it, there’s the same graph, but scoping in on only the Top 10 songs on Spotify each week. Since streaming data shows how many times people play a song, not how many different people play it, songs tend to get the most plays when they’re brand new and the artists’ biggest fans are binging their latest release. By examining how many plays the Top 10 songs on Spotify are getting, we can specifically see how much listeners like the latest releases.
Folks are definitely not digging this summer’s hits as much as they dug last summers’ hits—playing them less than half as often (41%) as they played last summer’s 10 biggest hits.
So which songs did people stream most in the first half of last summer?
Top Songs of the Summer of 2024’s first half:
Kendrick Lamar - Not Like Us
Tommy Richman - MILLION DOLLAR BABY
Sabrina Carpenter - Espresso
Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen - I Had Some Help
Shaboozey - A Bar Song (Tipsy)
Billie Eilish - BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Hozier - Too Sweet
Sabrina Carpenter - Please Please Please
Chappell Roan - Good Luck, Babe!
Taylor Swift, Post Malone - Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)
And in contrast, the biggest songs so far this summer, which are receiving only 41% as many plays as last summer’s 10 most-played hits on Spotify:
Top Songs of the Summer of 2025’s first half:
Alex Warren - Ordinary
sombr - back to friends
Morgan Wallen - Just In Case
Kendrick Lamar, SZA - luther (with sza)
sombr - undressed
Drake - NOKIA
Morgan Wallen, Tate McRae - What I Want (feat. Tate McRae)
Billie Eilish - BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Ravyn Lenae - Love Me Not
Morgan Wallen - I'm The Problem
Why are people playing the hits so much less often this summer?
Either fewer people are familiar with the Summer of ‘’25’s songs, or people are simply less passionate about them. Either way, it means smaller hits this summer.
I’d argue it’s both.
Morgan Wallen is clearly the best-known brand in Country music today, and he remains the artist whose fans have most fully embraced streaming. Despite several duets with Pop stars that have crossed over to Pop radio, Morgan Wallen doesn’t have a massive fan base who aren’t already Country fans. He’s no Kenny Rogers or Dolly Parton. So while “Just In Case” is pulling massive streaming numbers, it isn’t well known beyond Country partisans.
Meanwhile, several of this summer’s Pop songs haven’t yet been exposed to enough people to achieve widespread familiarity, including sombr’s “back to friends” and “undressed,” and Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not.”
On the other side of a hit song’s lifespan are Billie Eilish’s “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” and “luther,” by Kendrick Lamar & SZA. While these songs from last year have been mass appeal hits, they’ve reached the point where fans are getting tired of them and simply not as passionate about them when they were at their peak.
Finally, there’s Alex Warren’s “Ordinary.” I argued it’s the only real mass-appeal hit released so far this year. In its peak week, U.S. Spotify users played “Ordinary” 9.2 million times. It’s still garnering 7 million weekly plays eight weeks after peaking. For comparison, Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” peaked at around 12 million Spotify plays a week. It still got 10 million plays 10 weeks later.
Perhaps the real issue with Alex Warren having this Summer’s most-streamed song so far is that it primarily appeals to adults. As I noted in a previous post, this decade’s biggest hits are unusually adult-driven, appealing to the tastes of adult Millennials, not Gen Z’s high school kids and college-aged young adults. While last summer gave us Kendrick Lamar (who is still benefiting from his Superbowl halftime) and Chappel Roan, whose songs sound retro but whose values are not.
The Summer of ’25 simply hasn’t given us the Gen Z anthem we need to genuinely re-invigorate contemporary hit music.
I’m confident that day is coming.
As I outline in The Generational Music Theorem, those exciting evolutions in Pop music that make Top 40 radio fun and widely appealing again happen when a new, younger generation starts controlling which songs become hits.
Boomers took control and The Beatles invaded.
Gen X took over and New Wave saved us from Air Supply.
Millennials’ tastes moved Hip Hop from the gritty streets to the Crunk club.
Historically, these changes happen when the up-and-coming Generation’s oldest members turn 21.
Generation Z is awaiting their turn to evolve hit music. I expect we’ll hear it next Summer. In the meantime, if you want a preview of the impact Gen Z kids will likely have on what’s popular, check out these nine songs they’re already streaming on Spotify.
Date source for this post:
Spotify Charts (weeks of 1/7/2024 through 7/10/2025 for the USA): https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us