Why Are So Many 2025 Follow-Ups Flops?
From 2024's breakout artists to long-successful Pop icons, 2025 has been a highly disappointing year for follow up hits. Why are so many songs from successful stars falling flat?
What do Chappel Roan, Benson Boone, Sabrina Carpenter, Teddy Swims, The Weeknd and Playboi Carti, Shaboozey, Lady Gaga have in common?
In 2024, they all had huge hits that Spotify users and radio alike kept playing month after month.
In 2025, they all released songs that fell far short of their previous hits.
They’re not alone. Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, and Justin Bieber have all released songs this year that—despite extensive airplay—were quickly rejected by Spotify listeners.
The follow ups have flopped so hard that some music critics have declared 2025 the year without a song of the summer.
How big is the discrepancy between these artists’ previous hits and current flops? Why are Pop biggest starts suddenly struggling to delight their fans? What will it take for songs to catch on fire the way last year’s bangers did?
Let’s dive in by first comparing consumption of last year’s hits and this year’s stiffs.
Category #1: Listeners tried them and didn’t like them.
These artists’ massive 2024 hits created millions of fans eager to hear their new songs. Unfortunately, when those fans tried out their 2025 releases, those new songs failed to make them feel as awesome as their hits form last year did.
Sabrina Carpenter
You know you’re a big deal with The Onion mocks your album release.
She’d already splashed into Pop stardom with “Nonsense” and “Feather,” but the song that fully enshrined Carpenter into 2024 Pop royalty was “Espresso,” It was the 7th biggest song of 2024 on Billboard’s year-end chart. It debuted with an impressive 11 million weekly plays on Spotify in the U.S. and peaked with over 23 million plays in its 9th week.
“Manchild” debuted with only slightly more Spotify plays, but unlike “Espresso,” it went downhill from there. By “Manchild’s” 5th week, it only garnered half as many U.S. Spotify plays in the U.S. as it did that debut week. The song did get a massive bump in its 13th week when Carpenter released the full album, but that boost quickly vanished.
Manchild” was the 2nd most-played song on U.S. Top 40 radio last week. Stations played it over 14 thousand times. Despite this massive exposure, fans who embraced “Espresso” are rejecting “Manchild.”
It’s too soon to conclude the fate of Carpenter’s latest release “Tears,” but early streaming suggests it’s no “Espresso,” either.
Chappell Roan
She’s on par with Sabrina Carpenter as the biggest female Pop singer to emerge into mainstream fame last year. Arguably, Roan has more cultural cache with young people than does Carpenter. “Good Luck, Babe!” spent 14 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100’s top 10, peaking at #4. It was only the 37th most played song on the radio last year, but was the 19th most streamed song, according to Billboard’s year-end charts.
In March, Roan released “The Giver,” her much anticipated swerve into a Country vibe. It instantly reached #5 on the Hot 100—but then it fell out of the Top 10 entirely the next week.
Here’s how “Good Luck, Babe!” compared with “The Giver” in weekly Spotify plays in the U.S.:
Consider “Pink Pony Club,” Roan’s 3rd single from last year’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess that had its first peak on streaming last summer, then became even bigger early this year when Top 40 radio began playing it regularly. Compare its weekly Spotify plays to Roan’s second new single in 2025, “The Subway.” Less of a genre stretch than “The Giver,” “The Subway” is the kind of moody song with faint Taylor Swift vibes you’d expect Roan’s fans to eat up.
Yeah, not so much…
Not only did “The Subway” receive more plays when it dropped than did “The Giver,” its almost 16 million plays during its debut week ranks it among the 100 biggest debuts in U.S. Spotify history. (Check out my previous article on big debuts and why they’re not always big hits.)
Clearly, Roan fans didn’t like what they heard in “The Subway.” Its Spotify plays fell 40% in its 2nd week. By week six, it barely got one quarter as many plays as it got when it dropped.
Adding insult to injury, “The Subway” has received modest airplay. (Unlike “The Giver,” which radio barely played.) The radio exposure hasn’t bolstered the song’s streaming. (And yes, that does happen. I wrote about radio generating streaming in my previous article.)
In its 5th week, “Pink Pony Club,” which at the time was still an album track with less prominent than the supported single, “Good Luck, Babe!” had more weekly plays on Spotify than did “The Subway.” Ouch.
The massive debut week streaming of “The Subway” and “The Giver” are proof that Chappell Roan’s hits last year created millions of loyal fans who are eagerly anticipating more music form her. Unfortunately, those fans are quickly deciding her latest tunes don’t move them the way her three big hits last year did.
Playboi Carti and The Weeknd
They teamed up for “Timeless” in late 2024, a song that’s still in the Spotify 200 today. Despite debuting with over 14 million Spotify streams,. they couldn’t repeat that success for “Rather Lie.” It’s weekly plays fell rapidly and vanished from the Spotify 200 after only 14 weeks.
Justin Bieber
When he teamed up with The Kid LAROI for “Stay” in 2021, it was a #1 hit on Hot 100 and remained in the Top 10 for 44 weeks. After debuting with over 15 million plays its first week, it remained in the Spotify 200 for almost two years.
In 2025, Bieber still can attract a crowd with a new debut. “DAISES” debuted with almost as many plays in its first week as did “Stay.” Unlike Stay, however, “DAISES” weekly Spotify plays have fallen rapidly. It’s still in the Hot 100’s Top 10 as of this week thanks to radio airplay, but if Top 40 radio’s callout research catches up with streaming, it might not be there for long.
For all of these artists, they still have strong debuts, but their weekly plays plummeted rapidly as fans quickly abandoned these songs on streaming.
They’re popular artists who so far have failed to recreate the magic.
Category #2: Few Fans Tried the Follow Up
These artists face a very different challenge. The massive hits they had last year didn’t create a loyal legion of fans eagerly awaiting the songs they released this year.
Benson Boone
Consider “Beautiful Things,” the third biggest song of 2024. It didn’t receive tons of plays when it debuted but quickly grew to over 10 million plays each week on Spotify. It’s still among Spotify’s 200 most-played songs.
When Boone released “Sorry, I’m Here for Someone Else” and later “Mystical Magical,” both songs received less than half the plays their debut week than “Beautiful Things” did.
Unlike Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter’s follow ups, those few fans who did seek out Benson Boone’s 2025 releases actually kept playing them week after week—indicating that these songs weren’t rejected by Boone’s fans. The problem is, the massive audience that fell in love with “Beautiful Things” last year didn’t become Benson Boone fans.
Teddy Swims
“Lose Control” was the song of the year for 2024, according to Billboard. It spent a record 77 weeks in the Hot 100’s Top 10. Like “Beautiful Things,” it didn’t have a lot of fans anticipating its debut. As I dove into in my article Yes, Radio Still Makes Hits, “Lose Control” took 17 weeks to reach it’s peak week on Spotify, glacial growth by streaming standards. It never reached higher than #10 on the Spotify 200. Once fans found “Lose Control,” however, they never stopped playing it.
When Teddy Swims released “Bad Dreams,” few fans bothered to try it. The song garnered well under 3 million plays on Spotify its first week. However, those few fans who did seek it out apparently liked it. “Bad Dreams” consistently received around 2.5 million plays for weeks.
Bad Dreams wasn’t a song that fans tried and rejected. It’s simply a song that a relatively small group of fans tried and liked.
For these artists, fans loved their biggest hits, but they simply never cared that much about the artists behind them.
Category #3: Aging Legends
Then there established artists whose fans not only didn’t flock to their new releases the way they have in the past, their new songs also didn’t appeal strongly to those fans who did check them out.
Ariana Grande
She could still debut with almost 13 million plays and stay on the Spotify 200 for almost a year when “Positions” was a hit in 2020-2021. When Grande released “Twilight Zone” this year, fewer fans bother to check it out. It debuted with fewer than 9 million Spotify plays that first week. Furthermore, those fans who did try it clearly didn’t like it. “Twilight Zone” fell out of the Spotify 200 entirely after a measly five weeks
Lady Gaga
She teamed up with Bruno Mars and had a massive hit with “Die With A Smile.” When she released “Abracadabra,” however, its debut didn’t benefit from her previous hit, which was still wildly popular when “Abracadabra” dropped. Furthermore, while “Abracadabra” did find fans for its retro dance style, the song didn’t have the staying power among its smaller fan base that “Die With A Smile” has had, either.
Then there’s Ed Sheeran. His 2017 hit “Shape Of You” was the first song to top 2 billion streams on Spotify worldwide and remains its second most played song ever. Fast forward eight years. Despite significant airplay on Adult Contemporary stations, his 2025 release “Azizam” never even reached the Spotify 200.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard several teenagers lambast Sheeran as an artist as uncool as I recall Barry Manilow was to MTV-watching Xers in 1982.
What’s the solution?
We clearly can’t rely on Pop’s established stars to have the same success they had in years past.
What contemporary hit music desperately needs is for Generation Z’s music fans to propel an evolutionary style of songs into mainstream popularity: The kind of evolution when Boomers ignited Beatlemania in 1964. The kind of evolution when Gen Xers embraced New Wave in 1982. The evolution of Millennials transforming streetwise Gangster Rap into Club banging Crunk in 2003.
I wrote about these musical evolutions, when a new emerging generation takes control of picking the hits, in The Generational Music Theorem
All of these previous evolutions in Pop music updated existing music styles in a way that excited a new generation, but also quickly gained appeal among the older generation. While I have no idea who those artists will be or what songs they will release, you can get potential ideas by examining these Nine Future Gen Z Classics that are already permanent residents in the Spotify 200 despite no radio airplay.
History suggests we’ll finally see this Gen Z evolution sometime in 2026. For Top 40 Radio to continue as a viable radio format, I hope it isn’t a minute late.
Data sources for this post:
Spotify 200, United States, weeks ending January 3rd, 2019 through September 11th, 2025: https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us
Wikipedia’s Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 singles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_top-ten_singles
Billboard Year-End Songs Chart for 2024: https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/hot-100-songs/