The Song of Summer 2024 Is …

It’s the easiest Song of Summer wrap-up to write since 2011. It’s also the hardest. Those are good things.

In 2011, the Song of Summer felt like it could have as easily been “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull or “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” by Katy Perry. I went with “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO in part because of now-WHTZ (Z100) New York PD Mark Adams’s warning that if I selected anything else, robots and giant hamsters would come after me.

Having a hard choice in 2011 was a great thing — peak CHR at the moment when turbo-pop was still fun and playful, not yet pure bombast. Having a hard choice in 2024 is encouraging in different ways, the first moment between then and now when hit music seems to be on an up cycle. (It may seem like we’ve gone a long time without one, but it’s actually about as long as the lull between 1984 and 1997.) It’s a little more like trying to choose between “All Summer Long” and “I Kissed a Girl” in 2008.

When I asked Ross on Radio readers to declare their Song of Summer 2024, most didn’t respond with just one song, In my polls on Threads and Twitter/X, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” was the easy winner. But on Facebook, comments typically named multiple titles, while Shaboozy’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” came in well ahead of either “Espresso” or Post Malone & Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help.” All were fun, uptempo summer hits that don’t force me to bend my own criteria as I did for the midtempo “Cruel Summer” last year. “Espresso” represents a rebound for both pop music and radio. The other two demonstrated how Pop, Country, and streaming were coming together in a better way for all of radio.

I have ample place memories of all three songs. If I wanted the song that was there for the good times this summer, it was “Espresso” that was playing in the Uber on the way to the airport, and again on the way to the hotel. But “I Had Some Help” essentially kicked the summer off: heard for the first time as we were picking our daughter up from school, and heard for the first time on radio, not in a record label’s e-mail blast that is often an industry person’s first listen to a song.

For the first time, I went back to my listening notes for the summer. Those don’t cover my incidental punching around, just those stations that I thought I might write about later. But “I Had Some Help” was actually the song I heard most, in part because my regular listening took me to Country and Top 40. From that first listen, I recognized it as fun and uptempo and a worthy contender. It also says something about our format landscape that Malone had to make a  Country record to be fully accepted at CHR again.

“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” says even more about the landscape. It’s not just the Hip-Hop/Country hybrid smash that had eluded Blanco Brown, Breland, and ultimately Beyoncé. It’s the song that began with a streaming story and radiated to both Country and CHR. It was a hit from streaming that radio could use, rather than leaving it merely bemused. It felt finely calibrated but not merely calculated — a current day “flip” that did something new with its source material, rather than mostly remaking a beloved hit with weaker verses.

I also appreciate that “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” endures at No. 1 many weeks after the mere novelty of “Country song that samples ’00s Hip-Hop hit” could have worn off. It’s also worth noting that Dasha’s “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” has held on through the entire summer at both Pop and Country. The potency of the “Streaming + Country + CHR/Hot AC” equation at the moment likely means that Country/Pop/Dance songs will continue to be a category, and not just one that supplies event DJs with a leftfield record every few years. But Shaboozey was “the one song everybody requested in my mobile DJ business, too” says regular contributor Ben Reed.

Technically, streaming had also anointed “Espresso” before radio had time to jump in, but they’d already invested a year in Carpenter’s “Nonsense” and “Feather.” “Espresso” also met that key Song of Summer criteria of having somehow reached the people who don’t follow current pop music, such as the member of my Saturday afternoon “American Top 40” thread who heard it in an exercise class. RCA’s Keith Naftaly characterizes it as “having reached grandma recognition,” which is actually the best thing you can say about a megahit.

Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” also opened with big streaming as radio was still making room for it among two other hits, but I still regard her success this summer as a show of radio’s strength. These days, there are two sets of people who never listen to contemporary radio, grossly oversimplified here as “your kids” and “your parents.” Radio is still the conduit for transporting a song from the first group  to the second. Seeing the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 dominated by radio hits all summer bears that out. Even this week, Post Malone’s first-week streaming wasn’t enough to push “I Had Some Help” back to No. 1 or flood the top 10 with album cuts. It will be interesting to see what Carpenter’s “Short ‘n Sweet” places in the chart’s upper reaches next week.

That said, the ascent of Chappell Roan is as close as the-world-beyond-our-dial has come to making a true mainstream pop smash on its own. Radio’s support of “Good Luck, Babe!” did play a role in her meteoric rise, but for many readers, “Hot to Go!” was already the song of the summer. Radioinsight’s Lance Venta saw “35,000 plus [attendees] vote for it to be played at a baseball game in Los Angeles for a sing-along without a single radio spin in the market at the time.” Perhaps “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” could have done that, too, but there’s more for radio here.

The good news is that “Hot to Go!” gives us a Song-of-Fall ’24 frontrunner. Connoisseur’s Kevin Begley calls it “the big time closer coming in to save the game in the ninth inning” (proving, with Venta, that the Song of Summer discussion is never merely inside baseball.)  Roan and Carpenter both have enough songs to carry Top 40/Hot AC through the fall and protect us from the moment where today’s pop evaporates after Thanksgiving, if we allow them to. (Malone will certainly be doing that for Country.)

There were other significant accomplishments this summer. Like Shaboozey, Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” both radiated out from streaming and quickly went from “what now?” to “okay, now!!!” for radio. As KKFR Phoenix’s Jonathan Steele notes, “I’m over on the Rhythm side, and while Shaboozey did well for us … ‘Not Like Us’ [has] been a power since weeks after its release and it’s still not slowing down.” “Here in California, it’s ‘Not Like Us,’” writes Matt DelSignore. 

“Not Like Us” is also a reminder that Top 40’s comeback isn’t going to be complete until there’s a component of mass-appeal Hip-Hop. With Hozier’s “Too Sweet” capping a string of crossovers from the Triple-A side, it’s an opportunity for the balance that always marks a successful CHR. I also appreciate the true audacity of “Not Like Us” winning out over Eminem’s calculated outrage as Hip-Hop’s summer champ.

So what then is the Song of Summer 2024? At Z100, the summer’s clearest ratings success story so far, the choice was “Espresso.” Shortly after Labor Day, Carpenter took the No. 1, 2, and 3 songs on the UK chart, as well as the top album. In the U.S., she was No. 2 (with the new “Taste”), 3, and 4 behind Shaboozey. “Espresso” is also my personal favorite (by degrees) of the three contenders. I’m going to give Carpenter my “artist of the summer” nod, but it’s good news for pop music that even that distinction is up for grabs in the time of Chappell Roan.

On Tuesday, Billboard announced “I Had Some Help” as its Song of Summer. The issue of whether their choice should be definitive has already been discussed here. I’m happy that a fun, uptempo radio consensus hit is their No. 1, since it wasn’t that long ago that their choices were Da Baby’s “Rockstar” and BTS’ “Butter,” which didn’t tick all those boxes. But even on Billboard, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was No. 1 for two weeks longer than Post.

So “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is the ROR song of summer. It was the leading choice of readers and followers (perhaps recency helped). I’m wary of merely choosing the song that’s most-game-changing ever since picking “Boom Boom Pow” over “I Gotta Feeling,” but Shaboozey’s hit is, in fact, everything good about the convergence of streaming and radio, as well as the current Country and Top 40 coalition. It offered some help.