Why 2025 is Lacking Chart-Topping Singles

By this time last year, the charts were teeming with hits. To name a few—“TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” by Beyoncé, “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter, “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan, “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” by Billie Eilish, “MILLION DOLLAR BABY” by Tommy Richman, and “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone—had all been released by June.

The first half of 2025 has been fairly underwhelming by comparison, with less than half of the amount of hit songs as last year—at 23 compared to 49 in 2024. Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild”, Bad Bunny’s “DtMF” and “Ordinary” by Alex Warren are some of the few top-charting songs released this year. Many of 2025’s highest charting tracks—“Die With A Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, “APT.” by ROSÉ  and “Anxiety” by Doechii—are all 2024 holdovers.

There is also no obvious album of the summer. In 2024, it was Charli xcx’s Brat. In 2023, it was the Barbie The Album. There was some initial buzz around Miley Cyrus’s concept album, Something Beautiful, but it has yet to pay off in the charts. Addison Rae and Lorde’s new releases have also generated some momentum, but neither seems poised to culturally dominate at the same level.

Where are all the hits this year? And in the fragmented music landscape of 2025, what does a “hit” mean exactly?

What defines a hit?

Traditionally, radio play, record sales, and cultural impact were all factors in determining a hit. A common benchmark was a song that charted Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, or Top 75 of the UK Singles Chart.

“[Radio play] certainly created a single touchstone, or a series of a few that created a common culture for everybody,” says Noah Askin, an organizational behavior expert and former music industry researcher. “The song of the summer was always a big deal. That’s less of the case now.” 

In his 2015 TEDx talk, Askin analyzed 58 years of Billboard Hot 100 data to explore the patterns of what makes a hit. Ten years later, he doubts we can use the same metric. “It’s not as easy to define as it used to be, and it’s harder to make the case that Billboard captures everything.”

To some extent, the singular monoculture we once had surrounding hits has dissipated. Other homogeneities have taken its place—such as Spotify-core, characterized by the “pleasant, ignorable, and instantly forgettable” vibe you might find on a Chill Hits playlist. But for our traditional understanding of hits—the earworms—there appears to be less of a singular path to fame. Success is now splintered: a song might blow up on a playlist, from a movie feature, or a viral TikTok, but more than ever before, establishing cultural stickiness is nowhere close to a linear process.

Today, some degree of cross-media connection may be the most likely avenue to hit status, as Askin pointed out about music for popular films. “If a movie soundtrack blows up over the course of the summer, that’s going to feel more like a hit than a specific chart ranking.”

Soundtracks have been released ahead of their films for decades, but the strategy has come to stretch over a longer period. 

Rihanna’s “Friend of Mine” from the Smurfs soundtrack dropped on May 16th, two months ahead of the film. Since its release on Spotify, the single has seen a steady increase in listenership and received almost 6.4 million streams—not exactly a viral hit for Rihanna, but still eclipsing the rest of the album’s listenership by several million.

What makes a hit?

Not only have hits become harder to define, but the conditions that create a hit—and more importantly, the conditions for building a lasting career—have become opaque.

Some advocate for the power of exposure through platforms like TikTok—with the Rolling Stone going as far to say: “If you want to be heard, be on TikTok,” referencing viral breakouts like Gigi Perez. Others suggest that these platforms create something of an illusion of success, on the grounds that if sustainability through building a community of fans is the goal, virality is generally not a one-way ticket. 

While there are opportunities to make direct profit from TikTok with a featured song, they are negligible. Artists with distributors are eligible to receive TikTok micro-royalties based on the number of videos their music is featured in, not the number of plays. As of 2024, TikTok paid about 3 cents per feature—so if a song is featured in 1,000 videos, the artist would earn $30. 

There may be a case to make for exposure, but when it comes to some of the top TikTok songs of all time, there does not appear to be much in the way of TikTok-to-streaming-platform crossover.

This chart showing the popularity of the top ten TikTok songs featured in videos over the past few years indicates a generally upward trajectory.

When it comes to their performance on Spotify, however, listenership is not only significantly lower than the number of video plays for those songs, but it is also trending downwards. A likely reason for this is that on TikTok, many of these songs purely serve the video’s context.

A song like “Oh No” by Kreepa is not being used in TikToks because it’s a “hit” in the traditional sense, but rather for context for the content’s story. Even for songs with broader appeal, however, TikTok virality has proven to not always be the smoothest path to fame. Not only does the format of TikTok allow for users to become familiar with only a small portion of the song, potentially limiting audience knowledge of the artist’s overall body of work, artists may risk not being taken seriously or labeled as “TikTok music”.

When GAYLE’s viral song “abcdefu” reached mainstream popularity in 2022 and was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys, she received no shortage of internet backlash.

“I don’t think I knew what it meant to have a song…[get] too much attention, when a song gets quote-unquote overplayed,” she told Teen Vogue. “It was really hard for me that a song that I made very lightheartedly as a joke with one of my best friends…[be] the thing that I was getting judged off of.”

It is also true, however, that some artists have successfully used TikTok as a building block and refined their image over time. Take Lola Young’s sleeper hit “Messy”, which rose to hit status several months after its release when influencers Jake Shane and Sofia Richie Grainge posted themselves dancing to the track in a viral video.

Since around that time, Young has gained 38.2 million Spotify monthly listeners, almost reaching her total number of likes on TikTok.

As has also been pointed out about Young’s career, however, explosive virality does not guarantee meaningful engagement. Although the spike earned Young two million monthly global searches, only 0.4% of those searches (8,000) reached her website, and only 4,400 of those were unique visitors. “Virality is fleeting,” advises MusicRadar’s Mark Knight. “Success requires a multi-channel approach. Leverage trends, optimize for search, and create reasons for fans to stay connected.”

The impact of fragmentation on hits

A recent study by MIDiA Research shows that today’s fragmented music landscape continues to pose a challenge for new artist exposure. MIDiA predicts that as streaming platforms continue to operate as a passive listening space for label-signed artists, social apps will increasingly become a playground for active music discovery and fandom. Concentrated enthusiasm about a specific artist or a niche microgenre has created small but active online fan communities.

Artists like Laura Marling, Jeff Tweedy and Nick Cave have cultivated durability through newsletters and platforms like Substack. Marling’s newsletter, for instance, offering an inside look into her creative process, has a following of about 20,000 subscribers. Fan ecosystems like Marling’s are challenging the idea that monoculture “hits” are necessary to build a sustainable career. 

The fragmentation caused by global streaming has also had the effect of local markets charting more hits by local artists. As Scottish music economist Will Page describes in his co-authored paper with Chris Dalla Riva on “glocalization,” listeners are increasingly gravitating towards music local to their region. 

“If you’re a non-English speaking country with a strong national identity, then glocalization is a force for good. If, however, you are an English speaking country but not American, you’re kinda screwed,” describes Page. 

While fragmentation undoubtedly continues to affect the industry, the MIDiA study additionally suggests that we may be approaching or have already reached “peak fragmentation”, or the point where “the glass has shattered so many times it simply cannot shatter anymore”. The strong industry activity of 2024, including hits from new stars like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, could be indicative of an upcoming trend reversal.

What happens next?

All of this makes the dry spell of 2025 even more perplexing. Considering 2024’s momentum, we may have anticipated a continuation of the summer hit wave. Instead, we are seeing less hits, creating a sense of cultural despondency. Is it just a lull, or could it spell out something larger? 

“You can always come up with stories,” Askin told Chartmetric. “We like to attribute causes to these things, when it could just be a random series of events.”

Though it is difficult to pinpoint any individual cause, it may be worth considering a broader redefinition of a “hit”. As subcultures multiply and artists of all levels of fame find new ways of connecting with fans, the idea of a universally resonant hit is starting to feel outdated.

“I don’t get the sense that people care as much as they used to [about hits],” Askin added. “I don’t even know if artists do.” 

Whether we see a reversal of fragmentation—possibly involving a slow return to some form of hits-driven monoculture—, a continued shift toward smaller artists cultivating followings on alternative platforms, both, or something else entirely, one thing stands out: the hits of the future need more than just reach via streams to make a genuine impact. 

“How do you establish an identity and a genuine relationship with fans?” poses Askin. “Emotional availability fosters connection. And we need physical spaces, to find the desire to connect.”