When “Die With a Smile” — the powerhouse pairing of Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars — went No. 1 two weeks ago, it was almost more like, “Die already!”
Don’t get me me wrong — the belt-for-your-life ballad was one of the best songs of 2024, living every bit up to its superstar supersizing.
But the single came out way back in August — the dog days of summer, not the gray days of winter. So how the hell is this single topping the Billboard Hot 100 for the third straight week?
“Die With a Smile” is not the only recent hit that has seemed to live forever … and ever. At No. 4 is “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” the unstoppable Shaboozey smash that has logged a record-tying 19 weeks at No. 1 since it was released last April. That’s nine months and who knows how many double shots of whiskey ago.
Then at No. 7 there’s Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” which has been flying high on the charts since the summer.
Likewise, Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” — at No. 9 this week — just won’t go away. That unsinkable Swims single has been in the Top 10 a ridiculous 48(!) weeks since first reaching that chart mark a year ago in January 2024.
And the list goes on with other hits — from Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” — that have logged months in the Top 10.
So why have the charts been stuck on repeat?
One word: Streaming.
“Streaming is the most dominant metric, and the biggest streaming hits tend to be big streaming hits for a long time,” Gary Trust, Billboard managing director of charts and operations, exclusively told The Post.
And with the electronic monitoring that comes with streaming, he said, “We’re actually finding out what songs are truly being played the most … What the streaming era did is chart that repeat. We’ve been able to see what people keep going back to on demand.”
But at the end of the day, “The Hot 100 is a mass-appeal chart. It reflects the biggest hits among all genres, among all music listeners in the US. When you’re talking that kind of consensus, it’s not a surprising thing that people are going to keep coming back to ‘Birds of a Feather,’ ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy), ‘Lose Control,’ ‘I Had Some Help.’ People like comfort food.”
Still, it’s been a particularly tasty time for the kind of pop hits that are designed for consistent consumption by the masses.
“It’s been a good time for mass-appeal music helping the cause to become a big streaming hit,” said Trust. “You’ve got artists like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan who are finding support in so many different types of platforms among pop audiences on a level that feels bigger than it has at other times in the last several years.”
“It feels like we’re in one of those areas where everyone knows ‘Espresso,’ everyone knows the lyrics to ‘Espresso,’” he continued. “It’s a good time for pop music to be such a part of pop culture. If there’s a song that everybody knows, chances are so many people are streaming it, so many people are hearing it on the radio. That’s how you stay high on the charts for a long time.”
Also, some of the most enduring and inescapable hits are checking more boxes across the board.
“There’s more genre-blurring in music now probably than ever before,” said Trust. “It’s not lost on us that the two longest Hot 100 No. 1’s of all time are ‘Old Town Road’ [by Lil Nas X] and ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy),’ two songs that really expertly mix elements of R&B, hip-hop and country.
“You’ve got Morgan Wallen, who sometimes mixes hip-hop elements in the way he phrases some lyrics. You’ve got K-pop collaborations, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish mixing pop and rock … Everything is a little less ruled by radio formats. People don’t separate genres as much as they used to, both listeners and artists.”
All of this, though, can make it harder for new hits to break through and be discovered. Once the beast is made, we keep feeding it.
“Whereas once radio was maybe a place of music discovery, it’s a little bit more now the place where it ratifies the hit and says that, ‘If you’re going to be in the car for only 15 minutes, we’re going to make sure we’re playing the hits, because we know there’s a lot of competition,’ ” said Trust. “You can put Spotify on. You can listen to podcasts.So radio has tightened up and is a little bit more focused on the hits.
“If you look at our radio airplay charts, the Hot 100 songs stay there a lot longer now. So our streaming charts, our radio play charts, everything stays a lot longer than it used to for the top-level hits. Once they catch on, they can stay in high rotation for many months.”
But there’s still hope for new songs to break through.
“People might like the hits that they know and they go back to all the time,” said Trust, “but they always want something a little bit new to spice things up.”
