The Advent of Binge Listening (Or, How Chappell Roan Could Break Top 40 Radio)

Since the invention of the record, popular artists have had one big hit at a time. Could streaming be breaking this time-honored tradition?

Fans aren’t waiting for the next single from Chappell Roan. They’re streaming multiple songs simultaneously.

Picture it. You just dropped $28k on that kitchen remodel. Tuscan-themed. Sure to be timeless.

Your teens are running out to Circuit City to pick up more blank CD-Rs. Third time this week. Something about this online thing Napster.

You head to the living room with a red envelope. This new company mails you DVDs for a monthly subscription. When you’re done, you just stick it in the prepaid mailer, and they send you the next one on the list you filled out on their website. No more Blockbuster late fees!

They now even have DVDs of TV shows. Tonight, you’re reliving the X files!

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos noticed that you and many other customers sent back that DVD with the first four X Files the very next day. That surprised him. Nextflix assumed you’d watch one episode a night or so and then send back the DVD in a week. It hit Sarandos that you were actually watching the shows back-to-back, all at once.

Skip to 2013, when Netlix—now chiefly a streaming service—is about to launch their very own TV show.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Sarandos noted how people were streaming those old TV shows when Netflix uploaded them: “Some people watched two episodes at a time, some people watched three… nobody watched one.” So when it came time to release their new show, Sarandos decided, “Why don’t we just put it up—like the thousands of other things on Netflix—and do it all at once?”

House of Cards became the first TV show in history that released an entire season (13 episodes) at the same time. It’s the first TV show its viewers binge-watched.

Hit Songs Mirror Old-School TV Episodes: One At A Time

Meanwhile, we were still consuming popular music comparably to how you originally watched The X Files on Fox once a week: An artist would release a song. Radio played it. People bought it. When it stopped selling and radio stopped playing it, the artist would release the next song they’d recorded.

This pattern persisted—almost entirely unchanged—all the way from the rise of 78 RPM records to the demise of iTunes downloads.

Consider The Supremes. With 12 number ones on the Hot 100, they were not only Motown’s most successful act, but Dianna Ross’ Detroit quartet also remain America’s most successful vocal groups of all time. Despite having 19 Top 10 hits from 1964 to 1970, only one Supremes song, 1964’s "Come See About Me", entered the Top 10 while their previous hit, “Baby Love,” was still in the Top 10.

Rock icons The Rolling Stones had 23 Top 10 hits, including 13 during the same time frame as The Supremes. None of their hits were in the Top 10 during the same week.

Or take Three Dog Night, who dominated the early 1970s.

Or Prince, whose 14 top 10 hits during the 1980s defined the decade—and only one of those songs joined the Top 10 when the previous title was still in it.

Same story for Madonna and her 17 decade-defining Top 10s…

In the 1990s, Billboard began electronically tracking both record sales and radio airplay, famously lengthening the time songs remained in the Top 10.  Even with songs spending more time on the charts, the decade’s biggest artist, Marah Carey, only saw two Top 10 hits overlap their preceding singles during the decade.

Even Katy Perry, whose prime years were firmly entrenched throughout the peak of the iTunes era, still maintained the decades-old pattern for her 13 top 10 hits from 2008 to 2014.

I call this pattern Sequential Singles.

This system worked for record companies—don’t dilute sales of your current hit by releasing the next hit too soon.

This system worked for radio stations---don’t alienate your listeners with too many songs from the same artist.

It worked so well in fact that, during the first 60 years of the Billboard Hot 100 from 1958 until 2018, this Sequential Singles system famously only broke down once.

In 2024, is the Sequential Singles system finally on the cusp of collapsing?

Today, we’ll explore how Sequential Singles survived through numerous tech changes in both how we consume new music and how we chart its popularity. We’ll also examine how Binge Listening is now doing to hit music what Binge Watching did to TV—a change that’s a looming existential crisis for radio.

The Beatles (almost) accidentally invent Binge Listening

Actually, it was Capitol Records—and it was a blunder no label would ever repeat.

The legend goes that The Beatles invaded America with “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” which Capitol rushed to release on December 26^th, 1963, after a Washington D.C. Disc Jockey got a UK bootleg of the single and made it a hit ahead of schedule.

Except, that wasn’t when the Beatles first arrived in America.

When Capitol didn’t want to issue The Beatles in the U.S., parent EMI settled for Gary, Indiana’s Vee-Jay records to release “Please Please Me” in February 1963 and “From Me to You” in March. When Vee-Jay had… issues…, EMI turned to Philadelphia’s tiny Swan label (who’d had exactly one hit) to release “She Loves You” in September.

Legendary DJ Dick Biondi even played The Beatles on WLS Chicago and KRLA Los Angeles in 1963… Crickets.

So when Beatlemania finally did infect America in February 1964, those tiny labels—who still held the rights to their Beatles releases—realized they’d hit pay dirt.

• Swan re-released “She Loves You,”

• Vee-Jay revived “Please Please Me”

• They also created Tollie Records to release “Twist And Shout” as a single

When Capitol dropped “Can’t Buy Me Love” to promote the upcoming Beatles movie, with the previous four Beatles tracks still topping the Hot 100, it gave The Beatles the unprecedented feat of being the only artist until 2021 to have all of the Top Five songs on the Hot 100 for the week of April 4, 1964.

The first time—and until the streaming era the only time—an artist held the entire Hot 100’s top 5

For newly minted Beatles fans, it was heaven. For Capitol Records, it was a disaster.

At that time, many—including record executives—assumed Beatlemania was a fad. All these songs out at once would surely burn everyone out on The Beatles before they could capitalize on the mania.

They had the biggest artist in the world—and they weren’t in control of them.

For the remainder of their career, The Beatles would occasionally have two songs in the Top 10 simultaneously, often when both sides of the 45 became hits, such as ““Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You” (Also a per-Capitol release from Vee-Jay’s Tollie Records) or We Can Work It Out” and “Day Tripper”. Generally, even the biggest group in History stuck to Sequential Singles.

Having two songs in the Top 10 simultaneously remained highly rare. From the Hot 100’s launch in 1958 through the early 1990s, barely 1 percent of songs entered the Top 10 when the artist’s previous single was still in the Top 10. Half of those cases were The Beatles.

The only group that even came close were the Bee Gees, scoring three simultaneous Top 10 hits from The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1978.

The Beatles (intentionally) invent the rock album—and Binge Listening

From Elvis’ debut through the original Beatles invasion, people predominantly bought Pop music as single songs on 7-inch 45 RPM records. Yes, there were Pop albums, but they were an afterthought of recent hits and throwaway tracks. In 1960, labels made twice what they made on LPs from 45s. The “Long-Playing” LP record was for adults to play on dad’s Hi Fi; complete Symphonic words, Jazz, or Frank Sinatra’s latest. They weren’t for kids.

Arguably with Rubber Soul and indisputably with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles turned the album into a congruent work of art. Just as the four movements of a symphony are crafted to hear as one, The Beatles—inspired by The Beach Boys’ recent Pet Sounds—created a congruent flow of songs you played from beginning to end.

They also made the album a massive seller.

It was the #1 album in the U.S. for a then unprecedented 15 weeks. It sold 2.5 million copies in its first three months, more than any other previous Beatles LP.  

Johnny Rivers even wrote a song about how people played Sgt. Peppers All Summer Long.

In their homeland, pirate radio station Radio London played Sgt. Peppers from beginning to end.

That’s Binge Listening.

You’ll notice none of the classic tracks from Sgt. Pepper’s are in the graph above of their Top 10 hits. That’s because the Beatles did something else unprecedented: They released no singles from it. Back then, Billboard only counted a song if you could also buy a single version of the song. Selling as it was, they didn’t have to.

Since Billboard didn’t have listening devices in teenagers’ bedrooms to capture which songs they played, there’s no chart to track album binging.

By the 1980s, labels strategically packed albums full of potential hit singles. Even Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which famously contained more Top 10 hits than any LP before it, maintained the Sequential Singles tradition.

Streaming brings Binge Listening to the charts

Who would you suspect was the first artist to debut two songs from the same album into the Top 10 simultaneously. Taylor Swift? Drake? Olivia Rodrigo?

Nope… it was this goofball.

On January 28^th, 2017, Ed Sheeren’s “Shape Of You” and “Castle On The Hill” both debuted in the Hot 100’s Top 10.  While “Castle On The Hill” would only remain Top 10 for one week in the U.S. (peaking at #6), “Shape Of You” was a #1 smash that stayed Top 10 for 33 weeks.

It’s the first time that two tracks from the same album debuted in the Top 10 on the same date.

It was only the beginning of fans Binge Listening to new albums:

• February 2018: Drake repeats Ed Sheeran’s double debut with "God's Plan" (which remained Top 10 for 28 weeks) and "Diplomatic Immunity" (which was only Top 10 its debut week)

• May 2018: J Cole debuts three Top 10s simultaneously.

• July 2018: Drake launches four Top 10s the same week.

• July 2020: Juice Wrld scores five Top 10 debuts

• September 2021: Drake’s debut overtakes nine of the Top 10 slots—including all of the Top 5 slots for the first time by any artist since the Beatles in 1964.

• November 2022: Taylor Swift becomes the first artist in history to simultaneously hold all ten Top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 with her album Midnights.

Almost overnight, Binge Listening—the simultaneous charting of two or more tracks from an album—went from non-existent to commonplace. Since 2017, 20 different artists have debuted projects with two or more tracks simultaneously debuting in the Hot 100’s Top 10.

Meanwhile, radio’s model of exposing new releases remained unchanged and with good reason: Most of those new album tracks that debuted in the Top 10 were only played by Artist Stans checking them out. Generally, only one track from each album ultimately became a mass-appeal hit among an audience beyond the artist’s core fan base.

For a detailed look at how Artist Stans and Casual Fans music consumption patterns differ, click on the image for my post “Once Upon a Time when Radio Played New Music”

From Drake to Taylor Swift and from Kendrick Lamar to Morgan Wallen, no artist has released an album with more than one track remaining in the Top 10 for a month or longer.  Among the 123 different songs that fans binged the week their albums debuted from 2017 to 2024, 88 of them (72%) remained Top 10 for only one week.

“Anti Hero,” as noted above, is the only real mass-appeal hit from Taylor Swift’s 2022 album Midnights. When examining the weekly Spotify streams in the U.S. for the top 10 tracks on Midnights, each track receives fairly comparable number of plays the week Midnights debuted as Swifties sampled every single new song. The song pushed to radio, “Anti-Hero,” accounted for 13% that debut week.

Ten weeks later, “Anti Hero” garnered 25% of all streams from Midnights’ top 10 tracks, as every other title began dropping out of Spotify’s Top 200.

For other artists, labels still release their new tracks in stages.

Consider Sabrina Carpenter, the most successful Pop artist of 2024. Her Top 10 hits this year immediately went Top 10—but were each released weeks apart.

Radio’s Looming Binge Listening Problem

Chappell Roan may be the artist to create an existential crisis for radio.

Roan—who has achieved a particularly strong following among Generation Z fans—has already had seven different tracks remain among Spotify’s 200 most streamed songs in the U.S. for 20 weeks and counting.

So far, “Good Luck, Babe!” is the only track among those seven to reach the Hot 100’s Top 10, as it’s the only track that’s received massive Top 40 airplay. 

That song is now reaching the point where radio listeners begin to tire of hearing it every 90 minutes. Many stations are cueing “HOT TO GO!” as the next “single” from Chappell Roan.

There’s just one problem:

Hordes of Generation Z fans have already been playing “HOT TO GO” since early April. While its streaming has remained remarkably robust for weeks, the track already peaked with over 10 million weekly plays on August 8^th.

So did “Pink Pony Club”, the presumptuous third single from Roan’s debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

What makes Chappell Roan’s streaming pattern different?

#1: Her streaming is coming from Casual Fans who have just discovered her this year, not Artist Stans who already have grown to love her music

Unlike Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan didn’t have a built-in fan base ready to sample her latest releases based on their love of her previous work. Unlike Taylor Swift, who debuts with massive streaming that tapers off every week, Roan’s streaming started small and grew from week to week.

#2: Those Causal Fans are playing multiple songs at once and keep playing them wee after week. 

Also unlike most artists’ albums to date, from which one mass-appeal track ultimately emerges, fans are streaming several of Chappell Roan’s hits simultaneously, week after week. There’s not just one track from her album that’s ultimately becoming “the” hit that garners an increasing percentage of streams from the album.

Her new fans also aren’t waiting on radio to introduce them to the “next” hit. When a local Top 40 radio station starts playing “HOT TO GO!”, an unprecedented percentage of listeners have already been playing the song on Spotify for months. New fans are Binge Listening to the album’s mass appeal hits all at once the same way House Of Cards fans binged the entire season all at once.

So imagine what happens when your local Z Hits Kiss-FM proudly declares, “Here’s the new one from Chappell Roan,” for a song you and all your friends have been playing for months.

It’s not merely the vocal—but small—percentage of radio listeners who are die-hard Artist Stans who know “HOT TO GO!” has been out for months. It’s now the Casual Fans who know it’s old—and they’re a much higher percentage of the audience. 

You don’t simply sound dumb to a few listeners. You play a song that’s already old for many listeners. 

Chappell Roan could be the first artist to screw up radio’s Sequential Singles model.

If Binge Listening continues becoming widespread among even Casual Fans, radio will have to choose either:

1. break with seven decades of tradition and simultaneously play multiple popular songs from the same artist—even if that means playing the same artist every 20 to 25 minutes. This move would ensure radio is playing songs when they’re at their peak in appeal but would alienate any listeners who happened to hate that artist.

2. Keep playing only one hit at a time, knowing that any songs it plays later from the same album will already be “old” to an ever-increasing majority of its audience who’s already been streaming the song for months. Or, simply never play anything that’s not the biggest hit from the album.

I don’t have a definitive answer here.

For now, it appears radio is poised to travel a middle path here. Radio consultant and music guru Sean Ross (his Ross on Radio column is de rigor reading for radio programmers) notes, “Right now, most stations aren’t hung up at all on artist separation. […] Some stations are willing to play the same artist—even as a lead—two or three songs apart.” Ross notes, however, that radio doesn’t afford all artists multiple singles, arguably to radio’s detriment. “[W]hen you let Sabrina Carpenter have multiple songs in play, but not Gracie Abrams, you’re helping foster the notion that everything is Sabrina and nobody else has any hits.”

I will, however, confidently encourage radio personalities to replace the cliched, “here’s the latest,” with introductions that are both more original and accurate.

Data sources for this post:

• 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

• Spotify Charts (2019-2024 for the USA): https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us