How the ‘song of the summer’ became a cultural phenomenon

(CNN) — As the temperature outside heats up, so does the chatter around the “song of the summer” — the unofficial name for the track that becomes inescapable between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

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.

The designation isn’t purely objective or the result of a song’s chart position. Often, it’s based on vibes: What song just inexplicably feels like summer? What track simply seems to be everywhere?

The answer isn’t always straightforward. There are lots of “song of the summer” contenders each year, and the one that rises to the top might very well depend on your social circle and musical taste.

So what exactly defines the song of the summer? Where did the idea of a singular track to rule the season even come from? And in an age where social media and streaming platforms have fragmented the cultural landscape, does the song of the summer even exist anymore?

The long history of the summer song

The concept of a summer anthem goes back further than you might think.

David Hajdu, a music critic and author of “Love for Sale: Popular Music in America,” says the notion can be traced back to the sheet music industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Before the days of vinyl records and radio, people bought sheet music to play on pianos at home. Much of the music was religious or classical, but sheet music for secular, popular songs grew increasingly available over time, thanks in part to the emergence of publishing district Tin Pan Alley. The sheet music of songs such as “In the Good Old Summer Time” and the ragtime piece “The Coney Island Girl” sold millions of copies, Hajdu says. Those sales numbers indicated a song’s popularity, marking the beginning of the “song of the summer.”

As Phil Edwards wrote in 2016 for Vox, thousands of songs were being published a year in the early 1900s, and experts were deliberating even then about what would emerge as summer’s defining song.

One songwriter quoted in the Washington Post on May 12, 1907, declared that the popular song would be “the song that the drunk is going to sing,” while another songwriter lamented that “more songs fail because they are too good than because they are not good enough.”

With the introduction of records and radio in US households throughout the first half of the 1900s, runaway hits such as George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and lesser-known successes like Harry James’ “Sleepy Lagoon” proved popular over the summer, Hajdu says. But the song of the summer wasn’t yet the institution that it is today.

“It’s not like people were walking around in 1925 and saying, ‘You think that’s the summer song this year? No, that’s not the summer song this year,’” Hajdu says. “But the phenomenon was beginning to happen.”

In 1940, Billboard introduced its first chart ranking the sales of recorded songs, making it easier than ever to gauge a song’s popularity. But it wasn’t until the era of rock and roll in the late 1950s and ‘60s that the song of the summer became a full-blown phenomenon, per Hajdu.

Young people suddenly had free time and disposable income in the post-war period, and catchy hits by The Beach Boys channeled the carefree attitude of the times.

“‘California Girls,’ ‘Good Vibrations’ and a whole wave of songs evoke that idea of young people with time on their hands and some bucks in their pockets, enjoying that time,” Hajdu says.

Like many of the summer songs that came before and after them, the hits from this period were specifically about good times in the warmer months. These hits could be found across genres — 1964’s “Dancing In the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas, 1966’s “Summer in the City” by Lovin’ Spoonful and 1969’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone all presented summer as a time to kick back and let loose.

Summer songs at the time were hits in the true sense of the word. Sales charts were printed in local newspapers, and people followed them with the same fervor that they did sports statistics, according to Hajdu. Radio stations played a finite playlist of music over and over, exposing the general public to the same handful of songs.

“Whatever the big song was in 1964, 1958, 1972 was ubiquitous,” Hajdu says. “You couldn’t get in your car to drive more than five to 10 minutes without hearing it. You couldn’t walk around the mall or the shopping center or the downtown area without hearing the hit of the day.”

The ‘song of the summer’ becomes a subject of debate

While summer-defining songs were an established concept for decades, they weren’t really given intense consideration until the turn of the century, says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

New York Magazine’s 1995 Summer Fun issue devoted an article to examining the summer song as a unifying force — per the magazine, a summer song should be 1) released in the summer, 2) uncomplicated and 3) unforgettable.

Then in September 1999, the critic Ann Powers pitted contenders for the song of the summer against each other in a bracket-style showdown (“Livin’ La Vida Loca” vs. “Bailamos,” “If You Had My Love” vs. “Genie in a Bottle,” “Bills, Bills, Bills” vs. “Unpretty,” among them). In the end, she declared the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” the victor.

“That put in print this idea that we all know what the ‘song of the summer’ is; our parents and grandparents all associated certain songs with the summer; the music industry has released songs as summer songs,” Thompson says. “But now we’re going to call it a thing.”

Billboard launched its Songs of the Summer chart in 2010, its compilation of the season’s most popular songs based on radio airplay, sales and streaming data from Nielsen. MTV’s Video Music Awards introduced a song of summer category in 2013, with One Direction’s “Best Song Ever” nabbing the inaugural award. Media publications published annual round-ups debating the would-be song of the summer.

But broader changes to the music industry and entertainment media were already starting to affect the song of the summer as a phenomenon, Thompson says.

For much of the 20th century, industry gatekeepers decided what songs got made and were filtered down to the public through records, radio and linear television — producing a “monoculture” in which the American public had the same cultural touchpoints and in which a given song could become the “song of the summer.”

The rise of cable, the internet and online streaming splintered the pop culture landscape, giving people more control over what music they consumed. It also meant that a wider array of artists now had a shot at capturing the public’s attention.

“Just as we began to really identify and have a conversation about … the idea of the song of the summer, the whole notion of a song of the summer was collapsing before our very eyes,” Thompson says.

Does the song of the summer even exist anymore?

With the fracturing of popular music, obituaries from critics and journalists started pouring in.

“There Is No Song of the Summer,” the Washington Post proclaimed in 2016. That same year, Vulture declared “The Song of the Summer Is Dead.” A 2018 assessment from Rolling Stone suggested that “There Was No Song of the Summer This Year — and There Won’t Be Ever Again.” Though less assertive, the website Andscape last year posed the question, “Is the song of the summer a thing of the past?”

“When we casually throw out that ‘everyone’s listening to this,’ we are no longer talking about that massive mass audience in the pre-internet and even pre-cable era, where the word ‘everyone’ could be almost used literally,” Thompson says.

Social media and the algorithms that drive streaming platforms have also drastically shortened the shelf life of entertainment, making it harder for a particular song to achieve a level of success that endures over the whole summer, Hajdu says. Some songs seem to go viral almost instantaneously, but it might only be a matter of weeks before the public moves on to the next big thing.

It’s also the case that what one person deems the song of the summer might be totally different from what another person feels defined the season, says Jason Lipshutz, senior director of music at Billboard.

In 2023, Spotify and Billboard named country artist Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” the song of the summer — though some corners of the internet seemed perplexed at why the song seemed to be dominating country charts.

But audiences who don’t listen to country music could have conceivably passed the entire summer without ever hearing it, Lipshutz says. For some listeners, “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus or “Snooze” by SZA might have felt like the song that was “everywhere.” For others, the song of the summer might have been “Padam Padam” by Kylie Minogue, the club hit that was dubbed a Pride anthem by several publications (despite not charting high on Billboard’s Hot 100).

“Because the pop music monoculture has fractured to some degree, you have more disagreement of what was actually the song of the summer and what defined each summer for different audiences,” he adds.

Even as the song of the summer has become increasingly debatable, the idea that a single song could encapsulate a given summer continues to have a hold over our culture.

Thompson has a theory as to why: At a time when there is so much fragmentation over what we all consume, perhaps there’s nostalgia for the days when one song — regardless of whether or not people actually liked it — created a shared cultural experience.

“On some level, we want to have a discussion of what the song of the summer is because we are holding on to this hope that there actually is such a thing,” he says.

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