How to make a hit song in 2022
The top 10 biggest artists on Spotify in 2022. (Photo: RouteNote)
I spend a lot of time in fandom spaces. One thing I find fascinating, as one of the dinosaurs who basically built Gen Z internet fandom culture when I was fighting Beliebers on Twitter in the name of Harry Styles ten years ago, is how our consumption of media and support for artists have changed over time.
Back in 2012, the only content we mass streamed was music videos—and even then, the scale of consumption was vastly different. In 2012, I was among the legion of One Direction fans collectively streaming the Live While We’re Young music video in an effort to break Justin Bieber’s record number of views, and we did. LWWY got 8.24 million views in 24 hours, which at the time felt like a huge number.
Almost a decade later, in 2021, I was watching (and streaming) as BTS’ Butter multiplied that record by more than tenfold: It got 108.2 million views in 24 hours.
We also didn’t stream music ten years ago, because it just wasn’t a thing yet. All we had were CDs, iTunes, and in my case, Youtube to MP3 converters. But these days, new generations of fans feel obligated to stream their favorite artists’ songs religiously, to “give back” to the artists by helping them break records and securing them a spot on the charts—with the most extreme fans even going as far as shaming their fellow fandom members who don’t stream as much as they do.
The introduction of streaming platforms like Spotify and the cultural shift in the relationship between fans and artists, alongside the meteoric rise of platforms like TikTok, has caused massive shifts in the music industry. But what else has changed?
Less hits for longer, older songs go bigger
Morgan Wallen, a 29 year-old country singer with quite a few controversies under his belt, recently broke a 58 year-old record after his album Dangerous spent 86 consecutive weeks on the top 10 Billboard chart.
Dangerous was released in January 2021. It was the best-selling album in the US that year, and by July and August 2022, he was still selling out the equivalent of 526,000 albums. But while Wallen’s extended time on the charts is record-breaking, it isn’t exactly unique. The Weeknd’s The Highlights and Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour were released around the same time as Dangerous, and they are still currently outselling new releases.
The music industry is seeing an interesting trend in recent years: New hits are hard to come by, but when they do, they stay relevant for quite a while. The average time a song spends on Spotify’s top 200 is around 39 weeks, or three-quarters of a year. That’s 11 more weeks than the average in 2019.
This change can be attributed to the way media is consumed today. Ten or twenty years ago, fans like me would buy a CD or a vinyl record and it would count as one sale. With streaming, artists get paid for each additional listen, thousands to millions and billions of times, and so they get to spend longer on the charts. Bad Bunny, possibly the biggest artist in the world right now, recently hit No. 1 five months in a row with Un Verano Sin Ti.
Streaming has led to the revival of songs released even as far back as 37 years ago, like Kate Bush’s Running up That Hill—which is actually prompting journalists and industry experts to think that older music may be hurting the popularity of new music.
In fact, in 2022, old songs make up 70% of the US music market, and the market for new music is actually shrinking. All the growth in the music industry now comes from old songs.
The share of “catalog” songs in the music market vs new songs. (Source: MRC Data, The Atlantic)
Consumption of catalog songs, or songs older than 18 months, has gone up by a double-digit percentage in 2022. In 2018, 200 of the most popular new tracks accounted for 1 in 10 of total streams—but by 2021, that number was sliced in half to only 1 in 20.
Some point to the change in demographics on streaming platforms, as more Gen Xers and Baby Boomers are now on Spotify than there were a few years ago, as well as the resurfacing of songs like Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams and ABBA’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) via memes and dance challenges, as reasons for the renewed popularity of older songs. So how can musicians compete with catalog songs that are taking up more and more of the market?
Go viral or have an army
In 2022, there are a couple ways to make a new song a hit, and the first is going viral on TikTok. Songs used in memes, dance challenges, or as background music to compilations of people holding hands as they go on dates with their significant others are almost guaranteed hit songs.
Alternatively, having strong fandom support is a surefire recipe for a chart hit. Just take a look at K-Pop group BTS. The septet was the world’s best-selling artist two years in a row in 2020 and 2021, and that success was driven almost entirely by the efforts of their fans.
As a casual stan of a lot of musicians, watching the way the industry has changed over the past decade has been extremely interesting to me, and I’m excited to see where else it can go. Maybe in the next decade, for some unprecedented reason, streaming platforms will be obsolete and Youtube to MP3 converters will make a comeback. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be surprised.
