Where have all the great pop hits gone?

Telegraph

23-05-2025

The romantic ballad Ordinary by Californian singer-songwriter Alex Warren is – at the time of writing – enjoying its 10th week at number one in the UK singles chart. Released in February, the song is proving so popular that a special 'wedding version', stripped of its drums and thus tailor-made for that smoochy first dance, has had over 30 million plays on Spotify, twice as many as Ed Sheeran's most recent single Old Phone. But Ordinary is notable for another reason. Of the six songs that have topped the chart so far in 2025, it's the only one to have actually been released this calendar year.
Compared to Ordinary, the rest of this year's chart-toppers are positively vintage. Beckenham-born Lola Young's Messy and US rapper Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us both came out in May 2024 while Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club, which was number one for two weeks in March, was, astonishingly, released in the second week of lockdown in 2020. Only Gracie Adams' That's So True, number one in January, can vaguely be described as current, having been released last October.
A year ago the picture was so different as to be unrecognisable. By mid-May 2024, pop fans had been treated to fresh new hits galore. Sabrina Carpenter 's Espresso, Beyoncé's Texas Hold 'Em, Taylor Swift and Post Malone's Fortnight, Benson Boone's Beautiful Things, Tommy Richman's Million Dollar Baby and Roan's Good Luck, Babe! – to name just six of 2024's chart smashes – had all been released since the turn of the year. In the Official Charts Company's (OCC) list of the 20 biggest songs of 2024, 12 were released between January and mid-May last year.
Yet in the OCC's interim list of 2025's 20 biggest songs so far, released in April, only one track is from 2025 – the ubiquitous, and increasingly extra ordinary, Ordinary. Mega-hits always come out in the early months, goes record industry thinking. The biggest songs of 2022 and 2023 – Harry Styles' As It Was and Miley Cyrus's Flowers, both of which bagged Brits and Grammys – were released in the April and January of those years respectively.
All of which begs a pressing question: with the summer solstice just five weeks away, where are 2025's pop hits?
'Kids don't listen to the radio so something has to pop up on TikTok or YouTube in order to be a hit, and nothing really has,' is the glum take of one veteran record label boss. Even Private Eye, a magazine more used to dealing with corrupt MPs than corrupt MP3s, declares in its current issue that 'British pop has dried up'.
There is, charitably, one mitigating factor behind this year's hits slump: 2024 was a blockbuster year. Superstars Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Charli XCX and Carpenter all released new music last year and are now, bar Swift, on the 'touring' part of their album-tour-rest cycle (coming to the UK soon). But a gangbusters 2024 doesn't explain the fact that numerous much-vaunted 2025 comebacks have failed to light the cultural touchpaper as expected.
New albums by Lady Gaga and The Weeknd have so far failed to capture the cultural zeitgeist, while Lorde's comeback single failed to reach the top 10. Ed Sheeran's commercial comeback Azizam, described by this newspaper as 'featherweight musical Esperanto', peaked at number three – relatively low for the Suffolk hit-machine – while his aforementioned Old Phone recently entered the charts at a lowly number 17.
People are simply listening to less new music, a fact that has starkly come to the fore this year. Figures from music data company Chartmetric, crunched for the Telegraph, compared the number of Spotify streams received by two of last year's biggest hits with streams received by two of this year's biggest hits some 61 days after their respective releases. Espresso and Texas Hold 'Em, massive smashes in 2024, had been listened to 548 million and 305 million times at the 61-day mark. For Ordinary and Messy, chart-toppers this year, those figures were 198 million and 5.7 million.
Chaz Jenkins, chief commercial officer at Chartmetric, offers one theory. He says the music industry has been 'gradually focusing on Q2' – the months of April, May and June – 'for releasing 'hero' tracks in recent years', meaning that hits might be just around the corner. We'll see.
The bigger truth is that young people's listening habits have permanently changed. Generation Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – simply don't consume music in the same way that they used to, and this should be of grave concern to the music industry.
James Masterton runs the Chart Watch UK website and has been writing about the charts for over three decades. His take is sobering. 'Theoretically we should be in the middle of a golden age of pop music based on the available demographics. The really odd thing is that this hasn't emerged, which suggests that something deep-rooted has actually changed,' he says.
Masterton's theory is this. Pop music goes in cycles and always reaches a peak in popularity some 13 or 14 years after the end of an economic slump. This is because birth-rates historically surge just as economic conditions improve, thereby yielding a large cohort of pop-crazy teenagers 13 or 14 years later. So people born in the good times of the mid-1960s became teenagers in the late 1970s, when – guess what? – sales of singles reached an all-time high. And children born in the Thatcher boom of the mid-to-late 1980s became teenagers in the late-1990s, when – again – sales of CD singles went through the roof.
In theory, then, we should be seeing the same thing now. It was 14 years ago that we came out of the credit crunch and 13 years since the 2012 Olympics baby boom. Birth-rates rocketed, according to the ONS. The music industry in 2025 should therefore be making hay from music-mad teens. 'But where are they? Where is the pop music they're all engaging with?' says Masterton.
Teenagers' circumstances have changed, he says. Yes, they're online lots (nearly four hours a day for 13-14 year-olds). But their time is split between YouTube, gaming, social media, TV and music. The music industry used to be driven by new releases, forcing teenagers to go to record shops (remember them?) to buy the latest tunes. Teens no longer have to do this due to streaming's 'all you can eat for a monthly fee' model, so they're less bothered by new releases. An old song by Queen, for example, is just as likely to pique a teen's interest as a new Lady Gaga single.
'Everything that has gone on in the past has now got this mass appeal and so music consumption today is not so confined to up-to-date new music made by new artists. It's actually the long legacy of popular music that accounts for the vast majority of consumption,' says Masterton. Great if you're Kate Bush, less so if you're just starting out. Add to this Gen Z's reputation as the 'abstention generation', some of whom embrace digital minimalism along with a rejection of rabid consumption, and you can see why the music industry has a problem.
Familiarity has replaced newness in an industry that relies on newness to bring the money in. It's why songs can take years to reach number one (Pink Pony Club) rather than days, as in the past. It also explains the relatively slow burn of Messy and Ordinary. Chartmetric's Jenkins says the singles chart is no longer the summit of one mountain. Rather, it is 'the highest peak among a range of slightly smaller mountains'.
Only once artists have climbed these smaller mountains ­– by, say, being number one in a specific subgenre or really getting into people's heads ­– do they 'qualify' to climb the central peak. 'If they perform well climbing that central peak, they can stay at or near the summit for a very long time. If not, they move back onto their original mountain pretty quickly,' Jenkins says. It's therefore entirely possible, if not likely, that Gaga or Sheeran's recent releases will rise back up the charts in future months once they've become part of people's sonic furniture.
The corollary of all this is that record labels can no longer predict with any certainty what will be a hit, or when. Still, many labels chiefs remain chipper. Simon Robson, EMEA president for recorded music at Warner Music Group, foresees a 'great summer of music'.
Last year the label increased its A&R (artist development) spend and the results are showing: Warners artists currently account for half of the UK top 10 and half of the top ten tracks in the Spotify Global Top 200 chart (Warner's Atlantic label is behind Warren's Ordinary). Robson concedes, though, that 'in today's diverse and dynamic music industry, hits can come from almost anywhere and travel everywhere'. Record companies like his, he says, 'can help artists navigate this new landscape'.
Masterton, however, believes there's simply too much music out there. 'If people suddenly stopped making music tomorrow, we wouldn't necessarily feel the impact. It wouldn't be an emergency because you could go the rest of your life listening to music that has already been recorded and not run out of things to discover and enjoy,' he says.
But music won't stop tomorrow. And 2025 still desperately needs hits. As Lola Young says, it's messy.