For no less than a decade now – since Billboard began counting music streams in its chart calculations in 2013, and possibly earlier than – the sound of pop music has been sharply bifurcated between the extraordinarily on-line and intensely offline. The starlets you meme about on social media aren’t essentially making the songs you hear 20 instances on the radio in your commute, or within the espresso store choosing up breakfast, or out on the pool’s pumped-in audio system. 2024 had an particularly sharp divide; evaluate the charts to the dialog, and also you’ll see what I imply.
This makes speaking in regards to the 12 months in pop form of onerous! Was the summer season dominated by Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” a concoction made in a lab to max out each attainable Song Of The Summer vibe? Or was it dominated by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” or Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, two genial, country-adjacent singles that achieved song-of-the-summer standing on numbers, not vibes? Perhaps it was Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which managed to rule each on-line and offline: Within hours, on-line rap heads and Genius-pilled beef watchers had drafted a grand, footnoted, unified principle of the downfall of Drake, which numerous golf equipment and sound programs had been already blasting into observe? Or maybe you’ve heard of a factor referred to as a Brat Summer….
If there’s one factor that unites all of the strands of pop in 2024, it is perhaps: extra. Electropop’s gotten extra sleazy. R&B’s gotten extra luxurious and refined. The folkies and nation dudes have gotten extra burly and wailed extra loudly. And in fact, there’s extra of all of it than ever earlier than, – which makes narrowing the sphere to 40 songs tougher in flip. We might have gone to 50 or 100 or extra and nonetheless missed a whole bunch of goal bangers. But custom is custom, so right here’s our prime 40 countdown of 2024.
