How Can We Even Find 2025’s “Song of the Summer?”
With every scroll on social media, it seems as though this summer’s soundtrack is an amalgamation of everything from new releases to remixes. With many artists on tour or releasing new albums, and television series like “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and “Love Island: USA” gaining insane cultural capital, it’s difficult to define or even look for 2025’s singular “song of the summer.”
While it seems the internet has not come to a clear consensus, several tracks have been thrown into the ring for contention of the pop culture crown. Addison Rae’s debut album has made waves for fans of pop music, with “Fame is a Gun” and “Headphones On” standing out amongst content creators. In addition to the rise of Rae, Morgan Wallen and Alex Warren have dominated the top three spots on the Billboard Top 100 and Song of the Summer charts for weeks. Yet, the question of whether these tracks will earn the title of “song of the summer” by the general public is very much up in the air.
What factors contribute most to naming the track that will, in years to come, define summer 2025? In the age of streaming and TikTok, does the Billboard Top 100 even matter? Looking at cases of past summers, there is also a question of release date; does a track rollout need to have a specific timeline to earn the title?
Via @pisceswithasideoffries on TikTok.
Via @blalock307 on TikTok.
The history of the phrase “song of the summer” is slightly vague, but can be traced to the post-war listening habits of past youth. The rock’n’roll era of the 1950s and 60s aligns with a time in which people could feel carefree in the summer, and the music that dominated the mainstream reflected that. Thematically, the top songs of any given summer tended to call to the things that remind us of the season: the beach, the sun, the social life, etc. Songs like “Good Vibrations” and “California Girls” by The Beach Boys embodied the season in which they took up space. From that point on, with the increasing evolution of tracking sales or streams, the so-called “song of the summer” could be easily identified. Billboard first began to use numbers to track the song of the summer in 2010, then created a retrospective list going back to 1985, based on radio play, sales, and streaming data. The first track to be crowned a winner based on these merits was “California Gurls” by Katy Perry.
After the first couple years of “the song of the summer,” it no longer had to be a directly “summer-themed” track, but rather, if it was trending during the timeframe of Memorial Day to Labor Day, it was decided. As Harmeet Kaur of CNN defines it, “The song of the summer is the pesky earworm you hear blaring at the beach, the pool and the cookout. It’s the infectious hit endlessly remixed at the club and in videos all over TikTok. It’s the anthem that instantly transports you back to those hot, hazy months when you first heard it.” In 2024, for instance, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” took the world by storm shortly after its debut on the Coachella stage in April, placing it right at the sweet spot of a Memorial Day weekend takeover. The track was Carpenter’s first top five single on Billboard’s Hot 100, where it remained on the chart for 65 weeks. It also won two Grammy Awards at the 67th annual ceremony: Best Pop Solo Performance and Best Remixed Recording. Major record labels and corporations have the power and financial freedom to expedite results from their artists’ releases. The algorithms and timelines can be altered or favor a certain track heavily, which can further lead to the potential vitality and longevity of a song, like in the case of “Espresso.”
The decade of the 2020s has been an odd one, to say the least. With the top of 2020 marking the beginning of a global pandemic, the industry took a hit in various, unexpected ways. Many albums were released into an online void and world tours were cancelled, but listeners never stopped streaming. TikTok implemented itself as the “music app” by globalizing many hits that helped define 2020 for us all, including hits like Roddy Rich’s “The Box” and Dua Lipa’s “Levitating.” Music unified the world in this uncertain time, and the app has seemed to continue this phenomenon of a monotonous user culture, where what trends globally is decided upon by content creators and consumers online.
The new landscape and potential for how various songs can chart began to be redefined when Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl” re-entered the charts roughly 15 years after its initial release. This notion became prevalent again in the summer of 2022, when the fourth season of Netflix's hit show “Stranger Things” hit screens everywhere. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was a major plot point within the show itself, and furthermore resonated with audiences around the world. Similar to Furtado’s track, it entered the charts again, but in greater numbers than it had in the 1980s, also partly due to its vitality on TikTok. It hit number one in eight different countries, and the song is now the only one of Bush’s to have reached the US Top 40.
Keeping this instance in mind, it is also important to note the amount of trending hits that littered the 2022 scene, like “As It Was” by Harry Styles and “Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy. Yet, the attachment to a piece of culture that has a strong hold on society outside of the music industry may be another answer to how we can find the song of the summer. In July of 2023, the hit blockbuster “Barbie” was released, and alongside it came a soundtrack that featured an impressive roster of pop hit makers and was largely produced by Mark Ronson. Dua Lipa’s disco-pop track “Dance the Night” from the film’s soundtrack made Billboard’s chart, alongside Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” Swift’s track from her 2019 album Lover, which infested algorithms as a result from its feature in Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty and the sensation that was The Eras Tour. What these specific hits emphasize is the question of whether or not a song must have a life of its own outside of its own musicianship.
It’s also largely important to investigate the role a track’s vitality and listening traffic plays in its summertime popularity. At the beginning of the season, “Mystical Magical” by Benson Boone was exploding across social media platforms due to the lyrics, “Moonbeam ice cream, taking off your blue jeans,” from the pre-chorus. The sound bite did numbers from the sheer amount of hate and ridicule it was receiving. So, while the track may not be favored by the general public, it calls into question whether its infectious and highly recognizable tune will cement it as a song of its time.
Taking the timeline into consideration, it is also possible that 2025’s “song of summer” is already upon us, but the general public has simply yet to decide on it. The summer season still has a little over a month and a half left in it, and there are more tracks to be either discovered for the first time or brought back into the light from their past life. It’s nearly impossible to predict what will earn the title, given that our increasingly individualistic culture may not allow for something that does not inherently align with our taste be considered a “song of the summer.” It is also worth considering that it may be out of the listener’s hands. Major corporations may have marketing rollouts that will swing the mainstream into believing in one song or another. Addison Rae’s TikTok background leaves plenty of doubters, as well as those that are vehemently against the problematic Morgan Wallen. Many fight against the numbers and statistics as well, not buying the sheer number popularity of “Ordinary” by Alex Warren or anything by Benson Boone being a winner.
So, maybe the song hasn’t been released yet. Or maybe it’s been under our noses all along. It could be a seemingly random track from a completely different decade. There is no formula to curating popularity anymore. A thirty second sound bite can take the world by storm at any minute, and no one will be the wiser. Hopefully, come Sept. 1, our answer will be here in the form of a track that perfectly captures what “now” feels like.
