Songs That Made a Difference in 2024

There are years where I have to begin the Songs That Made a Difference column by reminding readers that I’m talking about songs that weren’t just the year’s biggest hits but represented a larger trend at our current-based radio formats. In some years, when there’s not much to talk about, I might default to a song that wasn’t necessarily unprecedented but proved that listeners still responded to mainstream uptempo pop when they heard it.

In 2024, almost every hit was tied to a larger trend. Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” was the bops-still-matter song, but it was set up in part by her “Feather,” an example of how radio can still develop artists, rather than leaving it all to streaming. Carpenter followed “Espresso” with the much less frothy “Please Please Please,” and became part of a new assertive female pop that CHR/Hot AC could own, not merely share with Country.

Even “Texas Hold ‘Em” by Beyoncé turned out not to be a category of one, helping to shape the year even without becoming more than an event record. “Texas” put Country in the spotlight in February, but it didn’t linger even at those formats where it got further up the charts. Instead Beyoncé introduced radio to Shaboozey, allowing “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” to become the Country/Hip-Hop hybrid smash that previously had eluded, say, Breland or Blanco Brown. 

In Ross on Radio, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was readers’ Song of Summer 2024. In Billboard, it had to “settle” for 19 weeks at No. 1. At CHR, where listeners pine for the variety of the old days, and usually mean Hip-Hop/R&B, Pop, and Country together, it allowed the format to get there with just one song.

By last year’s wrap-up, Top 40 PDs were already a little self-conscious about Country crossovers. 2024 began and ended with pop-flavored Morgan Wallen hits that many PDs still resisted. They were happier about “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone, with Wallen as the feature. Or records like “A Bar Song” or Dasha’s “Austin,” which, like a lot of hits this year, radiated from streaming to multiple formats. (At Country, “Austin” represented another trend: more artist signings from beyond labels’ Nashville divisions.)

When I wrote about Noah Kahan’s “Dial Drunk” in the 2023 wrap-up, it was very much an outlier, but a song with the potential to reopen the Triple-A-to-Alternative-to-Hot AC-to-CHR pipeline. After Kahan’s “Stick Season,” even neo-Mumford & Sons bluegrass-flavored pop wasn’t a category of one either, as Myles Smith’s “Stargazing” finally pulled ahead of Mark Ambor’s “Belong Together.” (Triple-A’s own surprise of the year was taking a neo-bluegrass song, Billy Strings’ “Gild the Lily,” to No. 1.)

CHR’s new acoustics were evident even by April. As “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims and “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone dominated, and “Too Sweet” by Hozier became a surprise hit, there were echoes of the mid-’90s Modern AC moment. It was significant that Hozier, who arrived with a format-breaking ballad a decade earlier, wanted to fill the uptempo pop void. By year-end, there were other songs by longtime Triple-A acts — Father John Misty’s “She Cleans Up,” Michigander’s “Giving Up” — that won’t likely make it to Hot AC/CHR but were uncharacteristically uptempo and immediate.

In June, Hozier, Carpenter, Shaboozy, Swims, and Malone/Wallen had all helped bring us what radio veteran Gene Baxter termed “the best Billboard Top 10 in ages.” At that moment, the biggest streaming songs, if not the rest of the Hot 100, were also radio hits. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” started as the sort of streaming-driven outliers that radio grapples with initially, but became a valuable part of that “best of everything” moment, particularly because there was a pop center.  

One sign of current music’s strength was that there wasn’t the proliferation of older titles suddenly propelled back to radio by TikTok and other streaming stories. It is Alternative radio, still looking for a center, that is currently acknowledging the resurgence of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps.” It’s also telling that Alternative also needed Royel Otis’s “Murder on the Dance Floor” more than Top 40 needed Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s briefly resurgent original.

Much of that was because pop radio had the summer combo of Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather.” Roan stunned the music world this spring as the act who was already a star to your daughter and all her friends, but Eilish helped define that category five years ago. Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” was reminiscent of a lot of similarly cutting, but not quite as accessible music heard at Alternative and Triple-A in recent years. One reader commented on the success of the Last Dinner Party’s “Nothing Matters” at those formats. After Roan, they wouldn’t be a stretch at pop.

Because Roan was already a star, she almost pulled off the song-of-the-summer without needing radio’s critical mass. Catching one person singing along to a hit in public is anecdotal evidence. Radioinsight’s Lance Venta heard 35,000 Angels fans who knew the words to “Hot to Go!” before it had a single spin on Southern California radio. Radio’s only flex was that the songs it embraced immediately became even bigger summer hits.

In early summer, Top 40 had not just great variety, but emerging stars, and also a range of strong female viewpoints. At year’s end, that moment feels long gone. Six months of radio/streaming alignment in the top 10 gave way first to Lamar’s GNX, then to the deluge of Christmas streams. The dominant female voice of the moment is Mariah Carey. “Too Sweet” now represents not a stylistic departure, but, like “Blinding Lights” or “As It Was” or “Flowers,” the hit that wouldn’t leave, in part because there was seemingly nothing to replace it.

And yet, there are still records that shape radio. “That’s So True” by Gracie Abrams is the poppiest of the potential female breakthroughs, but it brings forth another artist who was already selling out concerts. ROSÉ & Bruno Mars’ “APT” is our most-exciting radio record. (If radio could get past having three Blackpink-related solo hits, Jennie’s “Mantra” and Lisa’s “Moonlit Floor” sound great on the radio, too.) In part because of its iHeart CHR showcase, K-Pop is a factor many years after programmers were ready to dismiss it.

Country ended the year with Ella Langley & Riley Green’s “You Look Like You Love Me” and Koe Wetzel & Jessie Murph’s “High Road.” As hits, they were both very 2024 — new artists broken by streaming and quickly propelled up an often-glacial chart. But they also recalled the fast-breaking reaction records that I grew up with. 

That a more traditionally developed mainstream hit, George Birge’s “Cowboy Songs,” went to No. 1 in between those duets is telling of Country’s balance (and more sustained ratings improvement) at the moment. In Canada, Sacha’s “Hey Mom I Made It” was very mainstream Country (with, perhaps, a little Zach Bryan-like introspection) that became the first top 5 hit for a solo black female artist.

It’s interesting that when I asked Facebook friends for the songs they considered most influential, some Country PDs mentioned not only this year’s “Pink Skies,” but last year’s “I Remember Everything (w/Kacey Musgraves),” even though the format never quite embraced Bryan. (Neither did CHR, but “Pink Skies” was still in power last month at WXLK [K92] Roanoke, Va., while “I Remember Everything” is still in power at WAEZ [Electric 99] Johnson City, Tenn.)

In his wrap-up of 2024, syndicated LiveLine host Mason Kelter points to the number of established acts that are due for new projects in 2025. Returning superstars are good when they follow the music in new directions, less so when they release not-as-fresh second iterations of their previous hits. Part of whatever gratification music provided in 2024 was its surprise factor. Top 40 still needs that to happen in a positive way going forward.

And what are your thoughts on the Songs That Made a Difference last year?