Why Are So Many Songs From 2024 in the 2025 Year-End Chart?
Notice anything unusual about this year’s top hits? Yes, more than half of them are from last year.
In 2024, there were 13 songs released that year in the Hitmakers final Top 25, as tallied by our data partner Luminate. As of Nov. 20, this year’s list includes just seven songs released in 2025, with a whopping 16 from 2024. In fact, four songs in the 2025 top 10 — Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” (which actually came out in 2023), Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” — were also in the 2024 top 10, and Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” is just outside, at 12.
Not all of the 2024 songs are necessarily holdovers from last year — several, including songs by Marias, Leon Thomas and Gracie Abrams, didn’t really break through until this year. And in a strange turn, “Good Luck Babe!,” Chappell Roan’s top-charting song in 2024, was overtaken this year by “Pink Pony Club,” which was released in 2020. The trend even led Billboard to change its Hot 100 eligibility rules in October, shortening the amount of time songs can be considered current.
What’s going on? Sure, factors like release schedules, timing (a song that was already charting in January will rack up more weekly numbers than ones released later in the year), the fragmentation resulting from streaming, and the much-vaunted “drought” of superstar albums played a role. But clearly this trend was much more than a seasonal blip.
So we went to the source — Luminate, Variety and Billboard’s data partner (which also is owned by Penske Media Corp.). Jaime Marconette, the company’s Nashville-based VP of Music Insights & Industry Relations, identified two key factors, although he stressed that there’s no purely scientific explanation. First, 2024 was a blockbuster year for pop, with many songs that had very long tails.
“Last year was an incredible year for pop music, with so many new voices,” Jaime says. “You had Sabrina Carpenter and Charlie xcx and Chappell Roan breaking through, and you also had Benson Boone, Teddy Swims and Shaboozey with their massive hits.”
Indeed, those latter three artists scored hits so massive that they threaten to overshadow the songs they’ve released since. Swims’ “Lose Control” even broke the record set by Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves” when it passed 92 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 back in June.
“When you have massive, massive songs like those, it is hard to get out of their shadow,” says one industry expert. “It’s not the artist’s fault or even the label’s fault — the fans are just like, ‘Nope, we’re not ready to move on yet.’”
Even less quantifiable is Marconette’s second factor, which he describes as the “nostalgia and escapism effect,” which often arises during challenging times. While he stops short of saying that people are feeling nostalgic for 2024, he does note a trend that could be extended in that direction. “For the first half of this year, current pop releases were down in volume,” he says. “And during that time we saw a big resurgence in ‘Recession Pop’ — songs from 2007 through 2012 like Miley Cyrus’ ‘Party in the USA.’ We also saw that happen during the pandemic — those escapism-type songs that point to a sense of ‘Get me outside of the current times.’”
One could even argue that the sense of escapism and optimism extends to the massive hits from “KPop Demon Hunters,” which was released in June and, along with new albums from Carpenter, Justin Bieber, Twice and others, have helped turn around the 2024 trend.
“New pop records didn’t really start having quite the same impact until the third quarter, which doesn’t usually happen,” Marconette concludes. “And it might be breaking the trend that we’ve been in.”
