Pop Music

If Taylor Swift Can’t Have a No. 1 Pop Hit in 2019, Can Anyone?

As “Old Town Road” fends off another challenger for a 12th straight week at the top, the recipe for pop success is less clear than ever.

By Josh Duboff

June 24, 2019

A few weeks ago, Katy Perry released what, by all accounts, was her most promising single in years. Coming off 2017's underperforming Witness, the Zedd-produced track “Never Really Over” had the DNA of Perry’s Teenage Dream–era hits but with its own fresh take, including a nod to au courant Norwegian musician Dagny’s “Love You Like That.”

But it was still a classic “pop” song—and those are becoming an increasingly endangered species, at least at the very top rungs of the charts. When “Never Really Over” debuted at No. 15, it was seen as mostly a success given the current landscape, where streaming plays an outsize role in determining chart performance, and rap and R&B rule the roost. It’s a long, long way from 2010, when Perry had five singles hit No. 1 from Teenage Dream, when the iTunes singles chart (where songs cost $1.29 a pop) was the must-see digital list, and when radio still played an integral role.

The current potent symbol for this shift is presumptive song of the summer Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which just logged its 12th straight week at the No. 1 spot, just behind “Despacito” and “One Sweet Day” for the all-time record. This week, it managed to fend off Taylor Swift’s latest single, “You Need to Calm Down” (more on that song in a second). Earlier this summer, it bested attempts from Shawn Mendes, Post Malone, and Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber, all of whom could have reasonably expected a No. 1 hit in previous pop-music climates. This year, they aren’t able to nudge their way past a 2 minute 37 second country-rap hybrid by…a 20-year-old who has never released a proper single before, and who purchased the beat for this song for $30 from a Dutch teenager, before eventually enlisting a 57-year-old former country star to hop on a remix.

So what’s going on here? Part of it is the specific, odd power of “Old Town Road”; as a recent Stereogum piece pointed out, it’s similar to how the out-of-nowhere “Macarena” dominated the 1996 charts. “Old Town Road” appears to have hit a sweet spot of viral buzz—we’ve all, whether we sought it out or not, seen that video of Lil Nas X performing the song for schoolkids at least a dozen times on our feeds at this point—with actual “Hey, we want to listen to this at our pre-game” joy. Lil Nas X’s understanding of the internet—he is quite skilled at Twitter—and his feel for the streaming game (where the shorter the song is, the better) are also factors here. It is probably little coincidence that the most recent singles from Swift and Cardi B clock in at 2:51 and 2:24, respectively. (Lil Nas X’s newest single, “Panini,” is an even brisker 1:54.)

As “Old Town Road” continues to coast at the top, the most popular pop acts of the past few years continue to struggle to come up with the right sort of first-week launch to supplant him. If anyone was going to do it, it likely would have been Swift, whose Pride Month-timed single “You Need to Calm Down” supported the Equality Act and featured a range of LGBTQ celebs and the end of her multi-year feud with Perry. But Swift’s song ultimately landed at No. 2—a strong showing, and significantly higher than Perry’s, but still a contrast from her 1989-era dominance just five years ago. In April, when she released the first offering from her new album, Lover, “ME!”—a collaboration with Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie and a bright and fizzy pop tune in the vein of “Shake It Off” or other high-energy Swift singles—she was also held off from the top spot by “Old Town Road.”

On Friday, Camila Cabello and Mendes premiered a new music video and single, promoted like a blockbuster movie with more than a dozen Instagram posts between them and billboards and murals planted in major metropolitan areas. Will it be enough for their duet to dethrone Lil Nax X? They might have a better chance than some. Perry’s Max Martin-y pop sound, which characterized the early part of the decade, is struggling, chart-wise, against Latin and rap-infused pop offerings now. Cabello and Mendes’s song—called “Señorita”—leans into Cabello’s Latin roots, also showcased on her streaming hit last year, “Havana.” It is telling that Ariana Grande, a pop star who has continued to find chart success this year, achieved it with songs that are much more rap/R&B–leaning than any of her previous material. And Billie Eilish, the 17-year-old phenom whose “Bad Guy” has reached No. 2 on the charts this summer, is putting out pop that is heavily influenced by Soundcloud rap.

The Swifts and Perrys and Biebers are ultimately doing just fine, of course. Swift’s single proved she still has the eyes of the world on her every move. Perry’s has a critical mass genuinely excited about what she’ll release next. Bieber always manages to provide entertainment. But the sort of mainstream, sunny pop that they and others produced en masse now feels firmly outside the mainstream. At least, perhaps, until Lil Nas X, who has already proven his love of genre-hopping, gives it a shot—no doubt with a song clocking in just under two minutes.