Hit Songs Are Staying on the Top Charts Longer Than Ever

Morgan Wallen was supposed to be canceled. The 29-year-old country star was dropped by his talent agency and banned by radio stations after using a racial slur in a video posted to the website TMZ. Several of his fellow country stars urged the music industry to distance itself from Wallen. And yet, people just kept listening to his music.

Wallen’s album “Dangerous” broke the record for the longest stint in the top 10 on Billboard album charts earlier this month. “Dangerous” has been in the top 10 for 88 of the 89 weeks since it was released in January 2021. It was the best-selling album in the US last year, and it was the third best-selling album in the US for the first half of 2022. In July and August, Wallen sold the equivalent of 526,000 albums and came in at No. 25 on Bloomberg’s Pop Star Power Rankings.

While Wallen’s longevity is record-breaking, it’s not unique. Half of the 10 best-selling albums in the US during the first half of the year were released in 2021. Three different albums from the first couple months of last year, The Weeknd’s “The Highlights,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” and “Dangerous,” are still outselling almost every new release.

The music industry is having a harder time breaking new hits. But when it does, those hits stay relevant for longer than ever before. The average song in Spotify’s top 200 was there for 39 weeks in July and August, or three-quarters of a year. That is up 11 weeks (or almost four full months) from the average in 2019.

So why are songs spending more time on the charts, and what does that mean for the music business?

The simplest answer is streaming. When people buy a CD or a vinyl record, that sale is registered right away. The artist makes the same amount of money (and gets the same credit on the charts) if someone listens to it once or 500 times. In the past, sales of new music were more concentrated around the initial release. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” the best-selling album of 1985, hit No. 1 for three weeks in January of that year and never got back there.

With streaming, artists get paid for each additional listen. That elongates an album’s time on the charts. Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” almost certain to be this year’s top-seller, has hit No. 1 in five consecutive months.

The shift is forcing the industry to reconsider its terminology. Historically, “catalog” sales were anything older than 18 months. Yet Wallen’s “Dangerous” is older than that, and no one would describe it as such.

The trend has prompted some journalists and industry figures to claim that older music is hurting the popularity of new music. There’s some truth to that assertion. Streaming consumption of new music fell last year for the first time ever, according to Luminate, and is on pace to do so again in 2022. Meanwhile, consumption of catalog songs has climbed by a double-digit percentage.

Yet it’s not clear if people are listening to more old music, or if more old people are streaming. The early adopters of streaming services were, by and large, young users. Five years ago, 45% of people between the age of 12 and 24 said they were using Spotify, according to Edison Research. That was true for just 16% of people between the ages of 25 and 54. (There’s no data for those 55 and up.) Young people listen to more new music, so that skewed the streaming data.

Older generations have adopted streaming audio over the past few years, and they are listening to older music. That’s a big reason consumption of older music is going up.

Music industry executives worry there is another reason that songs aren’t leaving the charts, however. They don’t want to say it out loud, but they do say it in private. They are struggling to break new artists.

Several executives at top record labels have said it’s harder than ever to have an album get into the mainstream and remain there. That’s due, at least in part, to the sheer volume of new media competing for attention — be it podcasts, TV shows, video games or YouTube clips.

We live in a fragmented culture. Music fans used to discover their music on top 40 radio or MTV and then go to the stores to buy the album. The biggest hits of the 1980s and 1990s were massive. Even though music consumption is higher than it’s ever been, the hits are now smaller, at least in terms of sales. The only artists who get close to the biggest hits of yesteryear are Adele and, sometimes, Taylor Swift. Some music companies have actually bragged about not chasing hits for this reason. They don’t see the point in spending money on big stars that are delivering a shrinking share of total listeners.

“What we’ve done over the last number of years is reduce our dependency on superstars,” outgoing Warner Music Chief Executive Officer Steve Cooper said earlier this month.

There’s another factor. The most powerful marketing tool in music today, the social media app TikTok, doesn’t always help an artist develop a relationship with the audience. TikTok users often hear a song, but they don’t see the artist performing them as they might in a music video on YouTube. That’s because a fan is usually the one dancing in the clip. The result, industry executives say, is that a lot of new songs come and go in a matter of weeks.

And the big hits last forever.