Today’s Hits Are Born, Not Made: Why ‘Every Song Has to Prove Itself’ Upon Release or Risk Being Abandoned (2024)

In April, rising pop singer-songwriter Chappell Roan released “Good Luck, Babe!”, a sleek, synthy single with nonchalant verses and an emphatically dismissive chorus. Her album Midwest Princess had failed to crack the Billboard 200 when it came out the year before, but “Good Luck, Babe!” immediately showed signs of commercial promise, handily out-streaming previous tracks. It chugged onto the Billboard Hot 100, starting at No. 77, and eleven weeks later, with some coaxing, made it all the way to the top 10.

A version of this path used to be commonplace: It took time, usually months, to propel a single into the top 10. Today, however, it’s hard to find a trajectory like Chappell Roan’s; as of the third week of July, 75% of this year’s top 10 hits have debuted in the top 10. Launching a single has become more like launching a new album, or even a new movie — focus on pre-release marketing, live and die by first-week results.

This has its advantages. Because so much of pre-release marketing involves teasing songs on social media, artists and labels often know how the public feels about a track before it comes out, so they can spend promotional dollars more efficiently. And unlike movies, songs are relatively cheap to make, so if teasing one fails to arouse interest, an artist can cut bait quickly, or even trash a track and not bother to put it out.

“The industry used to front-load any strategy before they had the confidence that it’s working,” says Nick Bobetsky, who manages Chappell Roan. “You don’t have to do that now.”

But there’s a potential downside, too. Executives say that many artists and labels are often unwilling, or unable, to execute the sort of monthslong campaigns that create hits over time — think Latto's "Big Energy," Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control,” or Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season,” which all took more than 20 weeks to climb the chart and peak in the top 10.

“If you don't have a song react immediately, if it doesn't stream an extraordinary amount right away, everyone's like, ‘It's not working,’” says J Grand, a former major label A&R who owns the label 88 Classic. "In the same way we need to be patient building artists, we've got to be patient with songs we really believe in."

Twenty-five years ago, it was nearly impossible for a song to explode off the starting line and debut in the Hot 100's top 10. Chart position was determined by airplay, which usually grew as radio stations took time to gauge the success of a song in their market, and single sales, which often rose in conjunction with airplay and TV appearances and the release of a music video.

Back in 2000, an average top 10 hit took 11.6 weeks — nearly three months — to reach its peak. "Both the flow of information was slow and purchasing was slow," says Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify employee and the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. "It took a while for anybody to know that a thing was happening, and then it'd be a while before they worked up the enthusiasm to actually go to a record store and buy whatever it was."

Now, of course, social media ensures that news travels instantly, and the widespread adoption of streaming means that new music is just a click or two away. But an eight- or nine-week climb up the chart was routine until around 2018.

Planning, funding and executing that climb was the chief function of the record labels. "Back then, it was really governed by whether you went to radio, whether you were on TV, whether you had a big press story, or even whether your release was available at a store for people to buy," says John Fleckenstein, COO at RCA Records.

Labels still have these tools at their disposal — RCA took Latto's "Big Energy" to radio earlier than expected, according to Fleckenstein, after seeing listeners "were skewing a little older than they had on Latto's previous releases." "We don't feel that growing records is a lost art," he adds. Radio tends to play a crucial role in this process because stations typically add songs, and then play them more frequently, as they see them build, rather than immediately throwing a single into heavy rotation.

But radio doesn't drive as much music discovery as it used to, especially for young people, and TV viewership is way down; on top of that, driving listeners to a song is considerably harder in a climate where they have seemingly infinite choice.

So the marketing process starts earlier, usually weeks before a track is released, and sometimes before the track is even finished. "You try to get people's anticipation up for that song to come out," Fleckenstein says. Otherwise, it's just another track adrift in "a sea of content."

The biggest stars seem to generate anticipation simply by existing. And since multimetric charts incorporate streams, acts like Taylor Swift or Drake routinely enjoy multiple top 10 debuts on the Hot 100 whenever they release a new full-length; Swift has single-handedly occupied the whole top 10. (Before streaming, there was no way of measuring on-demand listening after the purchase of an album, constraining the amount of songs likely to appear on the Hot 100, particularly simultaneously.)

Lesser known acts typically build excitement by previewing a track on short-form video platforms and encouraging fans to pre-save it, so they'll listen the instant it arrives. The Swedish singer Benjamin Ingrosso shared snippets of "Look Who's Laughing Now" 32 times across TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts over five weeks before releasing the track in June. "The entire intention was to collect pre-saves," says Tim Collins, the singer's manager. "The whole f--king country knew the song before it came out," the single's release date was moved up because fans were clamoring for it on TikTok, and it debuted at No. 1 on the Sweden Songs chart.

In the old regime, labels would pick singles ahead of time and spend lavishly to support those tracks, but they were flying blind, with no indication of how listeners felt about the song. Now that's unnecessary. "If you throw up a brick, you're probably not going to get the marketing that you want for your project," Grand says.

"Every song has to prove itself," Bobetsky adds. "And with every new phase, the artist, in a lot of ways, has to re-prove themselves." This can be mentally taxing — an artist's position is never safe — and cruelly Darwinian.

This landscape may also foster a fickle approach to promotion. "Artists who have had a viral moment and leaned into it can be afraid to work other songs that don't instantly go viral," says Ethan Curtis, founder and CEO of PushPlay, a management company and marketing agency.

"They think, 'It didn't have the sauce, it's not that good,'" he explains. But "you might hit a nerve [on TikTok] because there's a certain topic that's trending that day, and if you posted that video yesterday, it wouldn't have gone."

Persistence paid off for one of Curtis' management clients, the singer JVKE, whose song "Golden Hour" took 22 weeks to peak in the top 10 early in 2023. "A handful" of initial posts with the track sank like a stone, according to Curtis. Some teams might have moved on.

But then JVKE generated excitement on TikTok with a clip where he played the song for his childhood piano teacher. After a few more videos in this vein, interest on the app started flagging, so JVKE's team encouraged other pianists to post their own clips playing the song "to showcase their chops."

They made more than two dozen remixes of the single as well – picking collaborators that would expand the song's geographical reach – then booked JVKE an appearance on The Tonight Show, and paid to push the track to radio. Later, they created their own TikTok fan pages to "repurpose and repost all the content we and others had made," Curtis says, which "extend[ed] the momentum just long enough to break into the top 10."

Would other singles benefit from the same sort of patient, sustained, multi-prong push over several months? "I don't think you should ever give up on a song," Bobetsky says. Still, he allows, "If you do justice to the song's promotion and exposure, and it's not sticky, then trying to keep amplifying it is pretending that we know better than the public."