Teddy Swims’ 2024 single “Lose Control” is a song about addiction and desire performed in an uplifting style perfect for sporting montages and self-improvement TikToks. Swim's refusal to quit his lover is reflected in an audience that seemingly also can’t shake the song’s grip. On May 27, “Lose Control” made chart history when it spent its 92nd week on the Billboard’s Hot 100, the most a song has spent on the chart since its inception in 1958. The last time “Lose Control” wasn’t in the Hot 100, Anthony Oliver’s “Rich Men North Of Richmond” was No.1 and the world was gripped by Barbenheimer fever.

It’s not just Teddy Swims who has squatters rights on the Hot 100. From Shaboozey’s “Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” to Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” and Sabrina Carpenter “Espresso,” the chart dated June 7 shows a new kind of normal where songs hit big and become part of the firmament. According to data from Billboard, the average number of weeks spent on Hot 100 by songs in the top 20 is currently 30.35 weeks; five years ago, that number was just 18.75 weeks. This gumming up is a relatively recent development. The only song to spend 70 or more weeks on Hot 100 before 2015 was Jason Mraz’s "I'm Yours.” No song released before 2000 ever spent 70 weeks on the chart. Meanwhile seven songs have already crossed the 70-week mark in this decade alone.

If you were looking at the Hot 100 to understand the sound of 2025, you’d have to deduce that it’s a lot like 2024. Bar a small number of exceptions, the chart lays clear that a lot of new music is struggling to break through. Why, and how did this become the new normal?

Gary Trust, Billboard’s managing director of charts and data operations, points to the “double whammy” of streaming playlists and radio as obstacles that can be hard to infiltrate. Streaming playlists, curated by platforms and users, are usually filled with the reliable big hits while radio in particular, Trust points out, “relies on established, comfort-food songs” that give popular songs a second wind, keeping songs in rotation for increasingly long periods.

Sam Lawson, who pays close attention to the Hot 100 as part of the chart community Talk Of The Charts, suggests that the events of 2024 are also still reverberating in the minds of music fans. He points out that 2024 was an “abnormally busy year” for popular music, citing Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" as a key indicator of how one song rode the waves of other pop culture moments to become a standalone success.

“‘Espresso’ debuted with only 155 points on the Hot 100,” Lawson says, referencing the system Billboard uses to combine sales, streaming, and airplay numbers. Though it made a modest debut, Billboard data shows that “Espresso” jumped significantly in points following two major pop events: Taylor Swift dropping The Tortured Poets Department in April 2024 and Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s beef taking off in May 2024. By that point, Lawson says, “‘Espresso’ stayed in the 250-300 point range throughout the summer.”

When pop’s A-List names release music and drive more casual listeners to streaming platforms, newer artists benefit from being part of that slipstream. Lawson says that the “lack of big, news-worthy moments in the music industry, as well as a lack of music releases by massive artists” so far in 2025 as key contributors to the “stagnant” nature of the chart at the moment.

The issue of stagnancy would be even more pronounced were it not for Morgan Wallen’s I’m The Problem, released in May. The huge success of the country artist’s latest blockbuster album has led to 30 of its 37 songs charting, in addition to his 2024 Post Malone collab “I Had Some Help,” giving the Hot 100 a mulleted makeover.

Minus the I’m The Problem takeover, however, only 13 songs in the top half of the Hot 100 were released in 2025. These include Drake’s “Nokia,” “Anxiety” by Doechii, and the current No. 1, “Ordinary” by former Hype House tenant turned singer-songwriter Alex Warren. Some 2025 songs like Benson Boone’s “Mystical Magical” (No. 42) are piggy-backing off the back of the artist’s 2024 smashes (“Beautiful Things” is 70 weeks on the chart and currently No. 10). Other new entries, such as Lola Young’s “Messy” and “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae, came out last year but have benefitted from TikTok virality in 2025. (TikTok activity does not currently feed the Hot 100 directly but, like MTV in the 1980s and ‘90s, it does spark radio airplay and streams.) While the success of “Ordinary” suggests that new releases aren’t being entirely blocked by these immovable behemoth hits, it still took 16 weeks for the song to climb to the top spot.

So what does this mean for new artists looking to score a major hit in 2025? Speak to anybody at a record label right now and they will tell you that establishing a new artist is a lottery. Even majors, who have more resources available to control the situation, admit that the process is slowing down. “The time horizon of breaking an artist 10 years ago used to be 18 to 36 months once they had signed to a major label,” Ben Maddahi, senior vice president of A&R for Columbia Records, told NME in 2023. “Now it’s more like three to five years.”

This is backed up by Mike Chester, general manager of Warner Records. Warner is home to Teddy Swims, Benson Boone, and sombr, one of the few new names on the charts in 2025. He made his Hot 100 debut in April with two gloomily compelling songs that are surging right now, “Undressed” (No. 29) and “Back To Friends” (No. 36). Warner signed sombr in 2023 after monitoring his releases since 2021, which to Chester shows that the idea of overnight success is a myth. “These songs are the result of years of growth on the artist and A&R side, and years of sombr growing his fanbase,” he says.

Chester adds that the expectations around success have shifted in recent years and that instant hit songs are no longer a given. “You need to build a clear artist proposition and truly understand the audience in order to create longevity.”

When thinking about the Hot 100, it’s important to divide things into pre- and post- streaming eras. Billboard first updated its rules to include streaming data in December 2014, essentially flipping the chart’s purpose from tracking new purchases of a song to regular listens. This means parsing the weekly numbers requires an ahistorical eye. Can the chart run of a song in 2025 be compared to that of the 1960s or ‘70s?

“The Hot 100 has always reflected the biggest song in the U.S. each week since its start in August 1958,” Billboard’s Trust says. “In that sense, a No. 1 today by Alex Warren is no different from a No. 1 by Elvis or the Beatles in the 1960s.” The shift in eras, however, Lawson says, has made it “more difficult than ever to dominate the chart when chart performance is dependent upon millions of streams, rather than thousands of sales.”

When looking to predict what could be a future Hot 100 mainstay, it seems obvious to go straight to the streaming platforms. On June 9, the song that sits atop Apple Music’s trademark playlist Today’s Hits is “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter. Carpenter, like Benson Boone, already has an established hit in the Hot 100, and the pop star's latest release picked up 13 million streams on Spotify in its first three days of streaming, thanks in part to its place atop their similarly named playlist Today’s Top Hits, which boasts 35 million followers. Similarly, Carpenter has what Chester sees as a key to any artist looking to break through right now: “a level of connection that you can’t fake.” Don’t be surprised if it becomes the inescapable song of 2025 and is still lodged firmly in the Hot 100 this time next year, either.