In summer, the song sings itself,” wrote the American poet William Carlos Williams. It’s true – except, of course, when Sabrina Carpenter sings it. Just last year, Carpenter’s sugary disco track “Espresso” seemed to emanate from every radio and speaker system, spending seven weeks at No 1 in the UK, six weeks in the US, and racking up more than 1 billion streams on Spotify. It was, many people agreed, the Song of the Summer.
The summer song is one of pop’s greatest pleasures. Every year seems to bring a new, unavoidable earworm – played everywhere, from supermarkets to nightclubs, between the months of June and September. On some level, the “Song of the Summer” is an official title, its status enshrined by record chart companies Billboard in the US, and the UK’s Top 40. But what makes a Song of the Summer is also somewhat vibe-dependent – a particular mood in the musical monoculture, a you’ll-know-it-when-you-hear-it intuition. There are some songs from the last 25 years that just scream summer. Think of Nelly’s dancefloor classic “Hot In Herre”, crowned as Billboard’s 2002 summer pick. Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg’s fantasy-filled “California Gurls”, the winning bop in 2010. Or Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams’ cheeseball disco track “Get Lucky” – utterly inescapable in 2013. But what about 2025? For the first time in a long while, the ubiquitous Summer Banger has failed to really materialise.
Numerically speaking, this year’s Song of the Summer is, according to Billboard, Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”. The emotional ballad – a sort of fusion of Coldplay and Rag ’n’ Bone Man – has been the longest-running No 1 of the year, holding top spot in the US Billboard Hot 100 and its accompanying Summer Chart. In the UK, the song has spent 26 weeks in the Top 40 charts; 13 of them at No 1. The problem is that “Ordinary” doesn’t sound bright and summery at all – this is music suited to a Lloyds TSB advert, without the cultural cachet of an “Espresso” or “Poker Face”. “You hear the word summer, you just think beaches, barbecues, parties, not being in school and being carefree,” Gary Trust, Billboard Hot 100’s managing director of charts and data operations, tells me. “People think of The Beach Boys or ‘Macarena’, but this year the leading song is a ballad by a relatively new artist. So it’s not quite resonating.”
If we look past this official winner, there are shockingly few competitive alternatives: despite dozens of new releases from buzzy artists such as Lorde, Bad Bunny, Addison Rae, PinkPantheress and The Maccabees, nothing has stood out. Pop girlies might pick the synthy single “Manchild” – another Carpenter number – which has been steadily climbing the UK and US charts since its release in June. If you’re chronically online like me, then Jess Glynne’s saccharine 2015 jingle “Hold My Hand” might be your poison, thanks to a viral TikTok trend that parodies one ubiquitous Jet2Holidays advert. The options, that is to say, are too diffuse: summer isn’t so much one song as a cacophony of different songs, all blaring at once from every direction.
Music has never been a complete monoculture, but in the era of streaming, it feels completely disparate. We have unprecedented access to more than a century’s worth of recorded music – all vying for our time and attention. According to a recent report from analytics platform Luminate, the company that produces data for the Billboard charts, the US’s most listened to pop songs in 2025 were from an entirely different decade. Songs in the top five belonged to the “recession pop era” (released between 2007 and 2012), including Bruno Mars’ 2010 serenade “Just the Way You Are”, which had 91.9m on-demand streams, Miley Cyrus’s country-tinged 2009 hit “Party in the USA”, with 87m streams, and Lady Gaga’s 2008 electro-pop anthem “Poker Face”, with 83.6m. The report also revealed that of the top 10 most listened to songs so far this year in the US, only one was released in 2025: Warren’s “Ordinary” (the rest were from 2024 and 2023).
Nostalgia for older music, then, is pulling attention away from new releases. According to Luminate, the overall volume of new music is being listened to 3 per cent less year on year, with the decrease more apparent in hip-hop and pop, where listeners are delving into back catalogues. Trust explains that streaming has allowed our tastes to become more niche and selective. In traditional music consumption, listeners would engage with new music through radio stations, or music channels on TV, before visiting a physical record shop to buy them.
“That record store would be stocked mostly with current music,” he says, “so that was your pool of music to listen to, and the turnover of new records would be fairly quick. In the streaming era, you are exposed to pretty much every song that has ever been recorded, so the chances that you are going to pick only new music or mostly new music, it’s just mathematically going to be less.” And personal playlisting means that people continuously come back to their own set of songs.
“People like comfort food,” he adds. “If you like a song, even if you’ve heard it 100 times, you’ll keep playing it.”
This all means that it takes much longer for newer music to truly lift off. Songs that were released last year, such as Carpenter’s witty “Please Please Please”, Shaboozey’s country hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” or Benson Boone’s shrilly religious belter “Beautiful Things”, still remain in the charts today, leaving little room for 2025 releases to make a dent.
To achieve a summer hit, commercially, it’s about following a magic formula. Trust says it’s a combination of being “big in streaming, radio airplay and sales, all at the same time”, which generates nine-week No 1s, like “Ordinary”, that are difficult to knock off the top spot. “Once radio stations find a song that works, they’re going to keep playing it – it’s like the rich get richer, in some ways.”
Warren’s song isn’t, I should add, the first ballad to make Song of the Summer. While it’s true that, psychologically, we prefer happier, up-tempo songs during the sunnier months, and more emotive ones during the darker, colder seasons, “Ordinary” follows a pattern of more downbeat songs about romance staking their claim for the summer season. “Historically, ballads have been the number one songs for the summer in years past,” says Trust. “It’s not even uncommon if you go back to the Eighties and Nineties.” Mariah Carey’s 1990 bombastic love requiem “Vision of Love” was that year’s Billboard winner; the following year it was Bryan Adams’ rock ballad “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”.
Of course, a major factor in summertime chart battles is aggressive marketing campaigns. Labels frequently, and sometimes prematurely, will claim a new release is the “Song of the Summer” as early as June. However, Atlanta Cobb, a music marketing consultant who has aided the release of over 26 platinum singles and albums, tells me that listeners are being pushed away by such bold declarations. “Audiences are starting to resist being told what their summer anthem is,” says Cobb. “You can’t begin your campaign by announcing that it’s the ‘song of the summer’, you need to let the audience decide over time. It’s almost felt more gimmicky as the years have gone on, and become quite a tired-out viral hook. When those moments do land naturally, they can still be powerful, but they’re becoming rarer.”
With autumn just a few weeks away, it seems the opportunity has passed for an “Espresso”-like banger to monopolise the summer of 2025. But are we really missing out on much? “Working in music and being surrounded by it daily, I honestly don’t feel it’s made much of a difference,” says Cobb. “I love a big cultural moment that brings a community together, but this summer, my peers and I have naturally just filled the gap ourselves.” Besides, for all we know, Sabrina Carpenter is cooking up a “Song of the Winter” as we speak. “Freeze, Freeze, Freeze”, anyone?
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