Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why Every Hit Pop Song Sounds the Same Now

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? Or that a US vice president wrote a number one hit? Chris Dalla Riva is one of my favorite music journalists out there. He writes the substack Can't Get Much Higher where he publishes pieces on the intersection of music and data.  A couple years ago he embarked on a quest to listen to every single number 2 hit from the last six decades, and wrote about what he learned in his new book Uncharted Territory. The book is part celebration, part takedown of popular music, and also provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists. This book is genuinely so good and changed the way I think about so many songs and just how different periods in history were reflected in the music from their time. Chris joined me this week to discuss the past half a century of number 1 hits and what they say about our culture, political system and world at large. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz    https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0   https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

It was recorded and it just became a big song. I think it was number one for like five weeks or something. So he has the privilege of being the only U.S. vice president to compose a number one hit. Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? Or that a U.S. vice president wrote a number one hit? Chris Dalariva is one of my all-time favorite music journalists. He writes the substack, can't get much higher, where he publishes pieces about the intersection, of music and data.

A couple years ago, he embarked on a quest to listen to every single number one hit from the last six decades and wrote a book about what he learned called Uncharted Territory. The book is part celebration, part takedown of popular music, and it provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists.

This book is genuinely so good, and it completely changed the way that I think about so many hit songs and just how different periods in history were reflected in the music and the music and number one hits of their time. Chris joins me this week to talk about all of this. Hi, Chris.

Welcome to my podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, so you embarked on this task to listen to all of the number one hits going back decades. Before we get into kind of some of what you learned, what made you embark on this endeavor? I did not start off with this grand scheme to listen to every number one hit and write a book about it. But I'd always played in bands. I liked writing music. And at the time, I was working a job.

I didn't particularly love. So I was just looking for some musical. And I came up with this quest that I would go on to listen to every Billboard Hot 100 number one hit in history, which is Billboard's pop chart. It was started in August 1958, and it has changed over the decades, but it still exists to this day. And I was like, you know, I'm going to listen to one number one hit a day. Maybe I'll learn it on my guitar. But I've always worked with data. So I would track some things about these songs as I went along, started noticing some trends.

And I was like, yeah, you know, maybe I can write about, write a little bit about this. And slowly it just ballooned into an entire data-driven history of popular music over the last 65 years. But it started as just a weird little quest or a weird little daily diversion for me because I was looking for something to do at the end of the day to wind down. There was no timeline, so it didn't really matter how long it took me. And I think that allowed me to engage with the music a bit more deeply and come up with something that I think is somewhat unique and original. Well, so let's go back to 1958 when they first launched. the Hot 100. Can you talk to me about what you learned from that era from listening to those hit songs? What was the first number one billboard hit? The first number one on the Hot 100 was called

Poor Little Fool by Ricky Nelson, which in many ways is exemplary of tons of number one hits. You know, it's a song about Lost Love. Ricky Nelson was a television star. His, him and his family had a television show called, I believe, the Ozian Harriet show. And he was a child star, which, I mean, to me, this all sounds very, could be very 21st centuries, you know. So, some young kid gets thrust into the spotlight, decides to start a music career. It's not, I don't think, well remember number one, but I think it's exemplary of a lot of songs that topped the charts over the years. Up to that point, Billboard had various charts.

The Hot 100 was their attempt to be like, okay, this is the most popular song in the United States. Before that, they had charts that would track just sales or just the radio or back then just jukeboxes. This was their attempt to bring it all together. And that's what the Hot 100 has tried to be over the last. 65 years as digital downloads have come along and streaming and CDs and cassettes, they wanted to amalgamate all that information and say within this seven-day period,

this was the most popular song in the United States. The reason I started writing was I got through about 50 number ones and I was like, this is a little weird. There are a lot of number one hits about people dying. Doesn't seem like a popular song topic. So I go to discover there was this subgenre of songs called Teenage Tragedy Songs and they're very melodramatic. It's like a quintessential example is called Teen Angel by Mark Dining.

It's teenagers, high schoolers in love, their car stalls on the railroad tracks. They escape. And then the girl goes back because she left her like class ring in there that he gave her. And then she dies. And this was like, for five or six years, there were a lot of songs that were like this. And I was just like, that's a strange trend. But at the time, people just, that was just what certain popular songs were like. And this is what you see over and over again as you listen to all these songs.

or these weird trends crop up that don't seem to make sense looking back, but there's always weird stuff going on. Why do you think that there was this fixation around teen death, like, at that time? Or, like, what do you think was, like, resonant about that subgenre? If you go back, like, hundreds and hundreds of years, there's, like, a very long folk song tradition that's about death and dying. And I think that the world used to just be much more violent and, you know, infant mortality was much higher. But leading up to that era specifically, of course, there's a ton of tragedies in the beginning of the 20th century between the world wars, the Holocaust, the influenza pandemic, I mean the depression, there's a lot of stuff that's not great going on

and people are dying very regularly. I think that had some influence, but I also think this idea of teenagers was new at the time. From the research I've done up to like the 20th century, there wasn't really a distinct period between childhood and adulthood. It was like you're a kid and then one day you're an adult, you know, you're working on the farm. In the post-world war, two era as there was an economic boom in the U.S. There's a lot more disposable income. Compulsory education forces kids to be kids in that teenage age range to be hanging out all day for years on end. Suddenly trends develop around these people. Suddenly art is made specifically for them. And I think the teenage tragedy song is very much playing into something that would appeal to

that demographic, but is also playing off some larger trends, again, around like a lot of dark things that happened at the beginning of the 20th century. And there were also, there happened to be a lot of young, promising musicians who died pretty young in the run-up to that era. And actors, you know, Buddy Holly dies when he's in his early 20s. Hank Williams was a big country star. He died in his mid-20s. Jimmy Rogers was another country guy. I mean, this was sort of in the air, I guess. And when you combine all these socioeconomic things that are happening, these world events that are going on with the rise of teenagers as a group you can market towards and as a group that exists, you somehow ended up with this dark song trend for a couple of years.

That's so interesting. What came after that? So when you look at the history of popular music and like the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.K., for a lot of people it starts in 1964 or 1963 when like the Beatles really begin to become popular. That's like for a lot of people, that's like the Big Bang moment. of popular music. In the era leading right up to that is when it's this era of like professional songwriters that were out of the Brill Building in New York City, where you had people like Carol King and Jerry Gough and her husband writing songs that the pop starlet of the day would sing. So it's very much rock and roll is still in the air in that teenage tragedy era leading

up to that. And then eventually the Beatles show up and you get the whole British invasion phenomenon, which is its own breed of rock and roll, but it becomes associated with this idea that if you're going to be an artist who's taken seriously, you can't just perform your own songs, you have to write your own songs and you have to perform them yourself. That's an idea. It started about a decade before, but it becomes very associated with the Beatles. And I think it's cast a long shadow to this day where it's the same reason that Taylor Swift makes it very clear that she writes her own music. It's like, if you want to be taken seriously as an artist, you need to compose your own. music. Now, that's not the only way to make music, but it's an idea that is cast a long shadow and really emerged in the mid-1960s. Yeah, I guess, you know, when I think of the 60s and of that era of music, you do really think of all those singer-songwriters, right? And, like, their lyrics that they wrote, like, it felt very Taylor Swift of, like, it's all about kind of their lives, and you can sort of analyze the lyrics, and it does seem to kind of, like, have that more personal element to it. It's strange to think that that idea didn't exist before that. And I mean, you could go back

further. Like, people would listen to Frank Sinatra sing songs, even if he wasn't writing them, be like, oh, which actress is he singing about here? But the writing from a very personal perspective and, you know, we have to analyze what this artist is saying to understand their lives that people would do when they picked apart Bob Dylan lyrics or, you know, certain Beatles lyrics. That's an idea that really emerges in the 1960s. And I don't, and I think technology was something that allowed that when mass media begins to arise with, you know, the proliferation of the television, suddenly these artists who previously you would only hear on a record or maybe see a picture of them in a magazine were much more tangible. You could see them on television. You could watch them move around.

And I think that allows us to create this new celebrity culture that has precedent, but really I think the modern version starts to arise in that era. I'm wondering also like what the impact of technology advancements to and listening to music had. Like I guess I think of the 1950s more of like radio culture and then of course records existed. But I'm curious like as you looked at these hits moving from the 60s, even into the early 70s, like to me like the 60s and 70s really feel like such like record culture. Did the tech of the day play a role at all in shaping? like the landscape of hits? Totally. And that's one of the main themes that I come upon again and again in my book

is that music is often downstream of some sort of technological innovation. So one of the quintessential examples you hear is like, why is the pop song three minutes long? And part of the reason is that that's how much sound early records could hold. And if you look at singles up through like the mid to late 1960s, pop songs are very much in the two and a half to three minute range. towards the end of the 60s there is some improvements to vinyl technology where a single can hold a bit more sound without degrading. And that's when you get longer songs like Hey Jude by the Beatles, which lasts like seven minutes or like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. So it's very much artists were constrained by technology and they can push that to its edges and then there can be a new innovation where they're able to push their art beyond that.

Another one that I don't think you think about that often is just the microphone itself. If you ever hear like a very, very old recording, people sang in this way that was almost comical. They're projecting like crazy. And that's because, A, before microphones, if you're standing on a stage, you need people to hear you, you need to sing as loudly as possible. A vocal style that, like, Billy Eilish uses would not work if you don't have good microphone amplification technology. So when that arises in, like, the 1930s and 1940s, suddenly you get this softer vocal style that you'll associate with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. because now it's possible to record those sounds, whereas previously, you know, you were shouting into a giant horn to record your voice. You had to project.

It's the same reason why certain records that are really old records sound a certain way. Like they couldn't pick up bass frequencies. Whereas from the 60s onwards, suddenly we do a better job at picking up low-end sound. And that enables a lot of the popular music that you hear today. It's so fundamental that you almost don't even think about it, but it impacts the way. people choose to write songs and make their art. It's so crazy. I mean, just mentioning Billy Eilish now, I'm thinking of some of her songs and like that whispery voice she has. And I never have considered it that like the microphone, but it is such a thing, especially in like the internet world. And I mean,

we had like the rise of ASMR, I think because of these like microphones that pick up like just the softest intonations. What did you notice sort of next? Like I guess like how did you see pop shift forward? In very broad strokes, you could paint the history of American popular music as a shift towards an obsession with melody to a shift towards the obsession with rhythm. I think the end of this is, you know, hip-hop music is rhythm and lyricism are what move a genre like that. Whereas if you think of, again, I'll go back to like a Frank Sinatra song, it's really all about the melody that he's singing and the harmonies that are going on behind that. But we see rhythm become more fundamental in the 60s and 70s. Rock and roll is a very rhythmic genre, and then in the 70s you get to disco, which is even more rhythmic. In the 80s, you start to see more electronic genres where that rhythmic pulse is really what drives the genre.

And this is in broad strokes, something we see over the decades is how important rhythm becomes. And I think in the 70s, that really comes to a head with the rise of disco, which, you know, they say disco died, but it really just morphed into a million other popular genres that you listen to Duolipa today. or Lady Gaga today. I mean, you're still hearing the remnants of that rhythmic disco movement that was very popular in the 70s. But beyond that, when you get to the 80s, I think the thing that changes is image becomes as important as your sound. Because the rise of MTV, where you could have a video where, you know, the song wasn't that good, but you had a very compelling music video. You could have a career off of that. Your image suddenly mattered as much as the sound you were making, the songs you were singing. And people give a ton of examples of stars from the 70s who couldn't really hack it in the 80s because they didn't have the look that was required.

The one example you always hear is this guy, Christopher Cross. He had a couple hits in the late 70s and early 80s. And he was actually the first artist to win. Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best New Artist and Album of the Year at the Grammys. I've never heard of this man. Before Billy Eilish did it to go back to her. Like he has a very beautiful voice, but he just doesn't, he doesn't love. like a rock star. And I think people overstate this a little bit, but some people say that his career really faltered because it started right at the end of the 70s. And then by the 80s, your image became so important. This is the era of Prince and Michael Jackson and Madonna. And Christopher Cross wasn't a guy that was going to be dancing across the stage. But this era of image is we still live in it today. It's morphed over the years. But the way you look, the way you present yourself is just as important to you having a pop music career as are the sounds.

that come out of your mouth or your instruments. Yeah, when I think of a lot of those 80s hits, I think of the music video. Like Madonna's like a prayer. It's like you hear the music as much as you're seeing it in your mind kind of along with those iconic videos. Totally. That's the makings, again, of the modern pop star,

Madonna and Michael Jackson and Prince, who I think I would argue are your three biggest stars of that decade. People think of their album covers and their music videos as much as they think about their music. And it's all tied together. And that is, this is a world we still live in where your image matters. What were some of the Billboard Hot 100 song hits from that era? In the early 80s, your biggest hits are Billy Jean by Michael Jackson, beat it by Michael Jackson.

These are just the sum that come to mine, like a virgin by Madonna. Let's Go Crazy by Prince. Now that I've heard of that other guy that won on this awards, I'm like, wait a minute. Like, did anyone else sort of fall off the map who has? had, you know, has sort of like rode that wave and has sort of since been lost history. Yes. And this is what I think one of the fascinating things about listening to every number one hit is, when we talk about the history of popular music, you're going to talk in broad strokes about the biggest stars who made great music. Like if you talk about the 60s, you're going to talk about the Beatles.

If you talk about the 80s, you're going to talk about Michael Jackson. But there are tons and tons of people who are popular for a matter of weeks or months who are influential for those weeks and months and then are never heard from again. And this is a bias we have when we look at the past, is that you look back at the 80s. And of course, we don't listen to the bad stuff anymore, the stuff that's been forgotten. So it makes the past look a lot rosier than it actually was. Because now when people listen to music, they're like, why do we listen to all this bad, you know, all this bad stuff? It's like, well, in 20 years, someone's going to look back at the year 2025 and be like, I can't believe how good all the music was. But it's just because all the bad

stuff has been filtered out. Something that comes to mind is in the late 80s, There was a number one hit by this band called Sheriff. They were a Canadian, I believe a Canadian band. They had a huge hit called When I'm With You. The band wasn't even together at the time. They didn't release a music video for it. It went to number one. This is not a song that people talk about or associate with the 1980s regularly,

but it was tremendously popular for a time. A lot of artists, I think, at the end of the decade, Lisa Lisa and Colt Jam had multiple number one hits. Paula Abdul. I think more people associate her now with her run on American Idol than her you know, six or seven number one hits at the time. I mean, these people were huge, huge stars, but they don't remain the cultural touchstones that Michael Jackson and Madonna and Prince and Bruce Springsteen remain. It shows how transient pop music is, I think, just how quickly these people

can come and go. Pop in a sense, I mean, there's a disposable aspect to it. It's the music business. That's pop music, you know, and businesses chase trends. And we see that with music today. You know, there's a trend on TikTok. Everyone's going to try to jump on that to have. have their moment. It doesn't usually lead to a sustainable career, but you still might be able to make some money in the short term. Getting back to sort of like the technology of the time, another thing I think of when I think of the 80s as mixtapes and like the Walkman I think came about in the 80s, maybe certainly by the 90s. Did that affect the music landscape at all? Like, I mean, it seems like this was for the first time people could really like take the music with them. Yeah. I think there has been this long trend. I think really since the

1980s of listening by yourself and assuming that, you know, you have a very personal relationship with your music because you can take it anywhere with you. Whereas if you look back historically, I mean, music is a very social phenomenon. It's people in, say, the 1800s getting around the piano and Aunt Ginny's going to play some songs and we'll all sing along. Technology in this sense on the listener side creates a world where much of your listening can be done by yourself. and you can build sort of your personality around the things that you listen to. And I think the Walkman, you know, your CD player and eventually Napster and iPods and digital downloads make that world possible for listeners where music can be this very, very personal thing for you.

Not that that didn't exist earlier, but the fact that you could bring music anywhere with you and it became very accessible. It became ubiquitous in a way that changes the way we listen and how we relate to the the songs, how we, how songs can become part of our personality in a way that I don't think was possible decades earlier. One thing I guess I'm thinking of, you know, with 80s, but also even zooming back to the 60s, is the role that music plays in like pop culture and shaping our understanding of like race and class and culture. And I feel like with the rise of rap music, you saw, you know, this sort of very specific,

like urban, black culture entering into the mainstream. But I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about like pop music. music as a vehicle for like social change or just as an expression of the times. Because I feel like from that period, especially like the 60s through the 80s, it seems like it really had such an effect on culture or maybe it was more reflective of these bigger societal changes. Yeah, I think undoubtedly, especially in the 60s, I mean, you have very songs that are politically charged, something like the Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire, respect by Aretha Franklin, people got to be free by the rascals. I mean, these are songs that are calling for change outright.

And I think that is impactful. I think that is how people get exposed to certain things. But I think more generally, it is just the pop culture phenomenon in general. Now, a good example is Motown. If you look at the pre-hot 100, the large, large majority of the most popular songs on Billboard's charts were by white artists. And it's not like black artists or artists of other racial backgrounds weren't making music. It is just that certain audiences were closed off to black artists.

Artists that looked a certain way were marketed towards people that looked a certain way. A great example of this is Billboard first launched a chart called Harlem's Hip Parade, which is really just the most popular black artists. They then changed the name of this to their race records chart, and then when they decided that that wasn't a great name, they changed it to their rhythm and blues chart. And rhythm and blues or R&B is still a term that we use today, and is still largely associated with black artists,

but it's a direct descendant from Billboard's race records chart. So genre and race and gender are all sort of tied together. But in the 60s, we start to see more black artists, especially cross over into the mainstream. And the big example is Motown. I mean, there are maybe the most important label of that decade, the Supremes, the Temptations, Mary Wells, Diana Ross. The fact that these people are people that looked like this,

were suddenly on the Ed Sullivan show, on your television. If you were in Middle America, there's a chance that Diana Ross was the first black person that you regularly interacted with. And I use the term interacted with very, very loosely. I mean, you're just seeing her on television. But I think we underrate the ways in which popular music has a direct impact on race relations and the gender movement and the way we think about men and women in our society. And then that's different than like Motown's records were not often a call to action in the same way that some other records of the 1960s were.

But I think they were just as impactful just based on the exposure they gave to these artists. To jump forward in time, I guess, back to like the 80s into the 90s. What trends did you see emerge in that era and leading up to the millennium? Like, I feel like this was my childhood because I was a kid in the 90s. So I think of so many pop hits, but also the emergence of the. these like boy bands and this other sort of like true like pop culture, pop culture that it seems to have sort of like emerged like later on in that decade. Hip hop had emerged in the 70s. It starts to cross over in the 80s with hits by Run DMC and

Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff. But in the 90s, I mean, hip hop really crosses over to the point where hip hop music becomes popular music in the United States. That I think is the most important trend of the 1990s. But at the same time, and again, this is the interesting thing about listening to number one hits is that there's a lot of stuff from, I think, the 90s that I don't think is listened to as much anymore, but strongly defined that decade. Of course, you have Mariah Carey, as some of them, has more number one hits than almost anybody else. Many of her songs are these big, melodramatic ballads, and ballads of that nature. I mean, stuff you might also associate with Celine Dion. Yes, so many good Celine songs from now that I think about it from that era.

I mean, tremendously, tremendously popular. You know, the Titanic soundtrack was just as important in the... Oh, yeah, that was in the 90s. You know, it's fun to talk about the rise of hip hop because it's a very important musical genre and musical movement that really crossed over into the mainstream, but you still have these big ballads that also define that decade. And to your point, by the end of the decade, you have this emergence of like the young pop star comes back. In the 60s, your average pop star is something like 25 years old. But by 1980, it's like 30, 32. I mean, there are like older pop stars in that decade. I think of the balding Phil Collins as a great example who had a bunch of hits in the 80s.

But by the end of the 90s, we start seeing, you know, your younger pop stars again, your Backstreet Boys, your Britney Spears, your in sync. And interestingly, those artists are often working with songwriters out of Sweden, the most famous of which is Max Martin, who is going to work with Taylor Swift on her forthcoming album. And these Swedish songwriters really define the music of the late 1990s and early 2000s because they were writing for all of those groups. What did you notice entering into the 2000s, like post-millennial, I guess like 21st century, like the origins of 21st century pop music, like listening to those hits from the aughts. What trends did you see emerge there? I think the most interesting thing is this is not really a musical trend, but it's how we listened to change.

dramatically. In 1999, I believe Napster was launched. And it's hard to overstate how impactful Napster was on the music industry. For those that don't know, it was a file sharing service. Oh, God. I'm scared to think that I have listeners that are young enough that they wouldn't know Napster. I think about that a lot of times I'm talking about something like someone might not, someone I might be writing or talking to might not have used an iPod or something that was a. I heard kids are using iPods again to get around school cell phone bands. So they might they might be embracing some of our older generation technology again. But Napster was basically people could just upload whatever they wanted to this site.

You would go on. You would search for a song. You would see if anyone else on the network had it available and you could download it. Of course, this was illegal. I mean, it's copyright infringement. The music industry was not happy about this. They eventually shut Napster down. But the music industry revenues collapsed after this because even after shutting Napster down,

there were tons of other file sharing services like Limewire that arose in its wake. whether you were downloading music illegally or not or doing it legally through iTunes, it changed the way that we listened to music. Suddenly, you could pick apart an album however you wanted. If you were listening on vinyl or on CD, when you put on the Bare Naked Ladies album, you got that whole album,

even if you wanted to just listen to the one song on it, and you were probably going to listen to it end-to-end. You might jump around, but still, they really controlled the way that you consumed your music. Now you could go on to iTunes or Limewire and just download. the one specific song that you wanted. It sort of broke apart the album. Did that affect the Billboard hits of the time? Because I'm wondering if Billboard changed the way that they counted things at all

with the rise of some of these digital file sharing services. I guess they couldn't really count Napster plays. But what effect did that ultimately have on the way that hits were tracked or the songs that you discovered were really popular at that time? Yeah. So Billboard, of course, It ultimately is just an industry publication. So they had to stay in the good graces of the labels and various rights holders. So they weren't going to track what is trending on Napster or what is trending on Limewire. They were looking at digital downloads, typically from the iTunes store. What's interesting, though, is historically, the things that would chart would be singles.

There may have been a popular song that was on an album, but because it was not released as a single, it could not get to the top of the charts. They didn't know what you were listening to when you were. you bought the album. But now with iTunes, I could go on and if there was a new Britney Spears album, even if she put out one song as a single, I could buy just a different song because that was the one that I wanted. Stuff like that started to impact the charts where you would see artists would put out a specific song as a single, but another song would start to pop off and then suddenly they would put momentum behind that track. And we still see that up to this day. This happened on TikTok, I think during 2019 or 2020, the Doja Cat song Say So was not released as a single.

someone on TikTok started a dance around it and her team was like, this should be the single. This is what we have to put our marketing efforts behind. It puts fans on the driver's seat a little bit more than they ever were historically. TikTok, of course, and we can get into this, is like so intertwined with music. But I'm thinking even of the rise of social media in the late aughts and the early 2010s, it seems like it was already shaping music. Even I was thinking about when Facebook would hook into your Spotify and everybody could listen to what you were or see what you were listening to. And, you know, it was a lot of like college kids listening to just, I don't know what we were listening to at that time, Little John or something.

And even then on with Vine, which I know Vine wasn't like TikTok where they were licensing music, but there's so many like viral sort of music related audios that were popular on Vine. So I'm curious like what effect social media had and what platforms even back then pre-Tic Tac were affecting the hit economy. There's a book to be written by somebody about how music is always intertwined with social media platforms back to the beginning. Even pre-Facebook, music was a huge, huge part of MySpace. Oh, yeah. How could I even forget that? Of course. There was always like that music playing, where you could choose your hit song or something. Yeah. Bands of that era, that's where you came up, is like labels would be trawling through MySpace and seeing what people were listening to. And there were charts on MySpace and the people that ran MySpace were also into supporting

music. There was a great oral history about MySpace and music that I, whose name, it came out last year or a couple years ago, I can't remember his name, but it was very intertwined within the platform. And many of the stars you associate with that era, especially in like the punk and emo scenes came up on MySpace and that's what they built their audiences. And it's very, very similar to the way people will build audiences on TikTok today. The internet has fundamentally reshaped how people build their audiences. And it has for decades, for good and bad. I mean, again, if you go back to the 80s, you could be Whitney Houston. You've got a great voice. They'll be like, all right, we're going to make you a star. Would that happen? Not always. But with the internet,

it became possible for you to really build a huge fan base. And labels became more interested in people who were already arriving with a fan base that they had built online. You see that a lot with TikTok today, but it really does go back to those early internet platforms where you could build a fan base and interact with your audience directly. Especially in the early 2010s, I feel like so many pop stars are so intertwined with social media culture, like one direction, like that fandom online, the Justin Bieber, the Belieber fans online. Like, we're so powerful on Twitter. And I guess Twitter as like a mechanism for music fandom really became a thing.

And then also Instagram, too, where, you know, some of the most engaged with posts in the early 2010s, Sarah Fryer writes about this in her book, No Filter about Instagram, where Justin Bieber posts or Selena Gomez posts or, like, post by pop stars basically on Instagram about their lives. A great, great example of that is the song Call Me Maybe, which ended up being a huge, huge hit. Part of that was spawned by the fact that Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez posted a video to, I guess, Twitter and YouTube of them just lip syncing to it. Other people started to follow this trend, and suddenly this song just absolutely blew up. I mean, it's a super catchy song. It is a song you would expect to be popular, but it was a person posting a video online that wasn't the artist that suddenly could break an artist.

Justin Bieber, of course, has a huge following, but it became even crazier as the decade went on, where you could, again, be a random person on TikTok created dance. And suddenly, you know, you're that artist's best friend because now they have a popular song. Now it seems like we're in this era, I guess, like, since 2020, when everyone became extremely online, TikTok completely, you know, came to really dominate social media, I think in so many ways. Like, it's so funny when you mentioned Doja Say-So, because that is so emblematic to me of that era. but like in the past five years, what do you think the pop hits have shown about culture? I always say there's like this anonymization of the pop star where you can have a song that's tremendously popular on TikTok,

but nobody really knows who the artist is. Of course, you could go look up who it is. But the songs are more associated with these trends than they are with the artists themselves. And I see this again and again where you'll have big songs on TikTok and I'm like, I have no idea who this artist is. And it doesn't seem like anybody really does and then you never hear from them again. So TikTok fundamentally shaped that trend, and there are tons of sonic trends that I think really have blown up on TikTok over the years. Billy Eilish, to me, is like the quint—even though her career emerged before TikTok, she's like quintessential of sounds that I think are popular on the platform. The whispery, ASMR-e, vocal, she's very into distorted sounds that sounds sort of cool coming through an iPhone speaker, but to some—by some objective metric would probably be considered bad.

people engaging with things that work well or sound well on mobile phones is really emblematic of part of the sound that I think has crossed over into the mainstream. But at the same time, I think one of the biggest things of the last five years has been country music crossing over in the U.S. Morgan Wallen is the biggest example of this who makes like a hip-hop country sort of hybrid. But over the last couple of years, we've seen every artist and their mothers release country albums or country songs. Post Malone did the country album. Beyonce did the country album. Taylor Swift, who started in country, oddly, has not made a new country album. But the point stands that there's just been so much crossover between country and the rest of the pop universe, which is interesting. I mean, country sort of ebbs and flows and popularity over the decades, but it is back in full force right now. We've talked a bunch about technology affecting music, and I feel like now, of course, we're entering into this age of AI, and we're seeing these AI music hits submerge. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on, AI in music and whether you've seen the impact of AI affecting any of the more recent hits or the like sort of current hit landscape. I don't know if you would see a song that is completely AI

generated where it's like someone just went on Suno's the most popular platform, typed in a prompt and it spit back a song, you uploaded it immediately and it was a hit. I would see it more affecting workflows in various ways or be involved in hit songs in certain ways. A good example of this, and this isn't AI, but I think it was last summer, Sabrina Carpenter's song, Espresso, was tremendously popular. A lot of the instrumental from that song came from a website called Splice. Splice, it's like a beat store for producers. You could go on and buy little looping guitars or drum sounds or, I don't know, claps or even like people saying, woo, and stuff like that. And you hear that stuff all over popular songs, but the guitar on espresso came from this,

it was a royalty-free sample on this website, Splice, that those producers then turned into this huge song with Sabrina Carpenter. I see a world that's not far off. where someone were to generate maybe part of an instrumental with AI and then turn that into a hit song. I don't think that's exactly what people think of when they're like an AI generated hit. But I see that happening. Is that a good thing? I mean, you could debate that. As technology has appeared over the decades, people are always against it from everything from recording itself to radio to auto tune.

I mean, there's always pushback against this stuff. I don't see using AI in that way I described as a horrible thing. But the problem right now is going to be streaming services are just going to be flooded with AI-generated music. I mean, there was already so much being uploaded every day before there was any AI. And if you can generate tens of thousands of songs in a matter of minutes, upload all of them because there's...

The distribution costs are really small and just hope one of them hits and you make some money. I see that becoming a huge issue unless someone somewhere decides to choke that off in some way. probably at the distribution level. Because if you're familiar, there's tons of platforms. One of the more popular ones is called DistroKid, where you pay like 20 bucks a year, and they'll distribute your music to every streaming service out there.

You know, for 20 bucks a year, if I can upload unlimited songs and hope that one of them pops off enough to make back my 20 bucks, I could see people creating a lot of issues with that, just flooding platforms. I'm sure someone will have to try to stop it at some point because I don't know who's going to want to pay the server costs to store all the music.

That's a Spotify problem, I guess. or not Spotify, whatever is the hosting platform, I guess they've got to figure all that out. I have one final question, which is, I saw this fun fact. I think it's written in the description of your book, but a U.S. Vice President wrote a number one hit. What song was that? Yeah, good question. I certainly won. I don't think anyone will know. One of the first number one hits in the late 1950s called It's All in the Game by a forgotten pop star named Tommy Edwards. The music was written by Charles C. Dawes, who was the vice president to Calvin Coolidge. This guy died, I think, before the song became a number one hit.

But I guess he was an amateur musician. He wrote this little instrumental melody. And then decades later, somebody decided to set it to lyrics. It was recorded and it just became a big song. I think it was number one for like five weeks or something. So he has the privilege of being the only U.S. vice president to compose a number one hit. I guess until J.D. Vance gets in on the AI songmaking. Yeah, exactly.

All right, Chris, well, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people continue to follow your work? I'm an easy guy to find online. I'm C. Dallariva music on basically every platform. I have a popular newsletter about music and data called Can't Get Much Higher. It's so good. I love it, by the way. Thank you.

And my book is coming out soon in November. It's called Uncharted Territory, what numbers tell us, about the biggest hit songs and ourselves. You should be able to find it if you can't, find me, and I will help you with all your book-related issues. Awesome. Well, thanks so much again for chatting with me today. Thanks.

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