How the DNA of a hit changed in the last five years

Almost five years ago, MIDiA published “How the DNA of a hit has changed over 20 years”, examining structural differences between the Billboard Top 10 tracks of July 2000 and July 2020. This gave us a clear view of how the streaming era has impacted the makeup of songs. Now, we revisit that data and compare how hit songs have changed between 2020 and 2025 – considering the impact of the post-streaming era, including the dominance of social video. Certain aspects of hit songs, such as the growing average number of songwriters and shortening song length, have evolved in a similar direction since 2000. Still, hit songs have undergone a variety of structural changes in the last five years, with a handful of new twists.

Fewer young songwriters are breaking into the Top 10

While the average age for Top 10 songwriters in 2020 was 31.1, the average age for this week’s Top 10 was 36.3, reflecting a growing prevalence of veteran writers penning the biggest hits. It appears that fewer young songwriters are writing for big-name stars. Superstars may be playing it safe and working predominantly with more established songwriters rather than trusting new talent. However, the effect of this is seen among songwriters in MIDiA’s 2024 Songwriter Survey – 28% of songwriters listed “difficulty finding collaborators / pitching songs to artists” as one of their biggest career challenges.

Hip hop still dominates, but there is more genre ambiguity

Despite hip hop being the top genre among Top 10 songs in both 2020 and 2025, the most recent Top 10 includes more “hybrid genre” songs. For example, Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther” mixes hip hop and R&B, while Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” blends hip hop and country styles. “Genre-hopping” has become more common among today’s superstars, with Beyoncé’s foray into country music serving as the biggest example recently, hinting that big artists are no longer confined to a single genre.

YouTube views exploded

Between 2020 and 2025, YouTube views for the Top 10 increased by a mind-blowing 322%. Videos for the top 10 tracks on last week’s chart garnered an average of 322.6 million views each, though “APT.” by Rosé and Bruno Mars is an outlier with 1.2 billion views. Still, even removing “APT.” from the equation, 2025’s Top 10 songs have an average of 225.1 million YouTube views – a 195% increase from 2020. This increase in viewership is somewhat unsurprising, given YouTube’s global dominance as a platform – the percentage of consumers who watch music videos on YouTube at least monthly has risen from 50% in 2020 to 67% in 2024 (source: MIDiA Research Q4 2020 Consumer Survey, Q4 2024 Consumer Survey). The growth of social video could be directing more consumers towards music videos and other video content. Furthermore, 50% of the Top 10 songs had music videos (rather than visualisers, live clips, or videos with static visuals), hinting that the “music video era” may not be over.

Top songs are reigning for longer

While the top tracks in July 2000 spent an average of 19.4 weeks on the Hot 100, that average dropped to 18.6 weeks in July 2020. But in this week’s chart, the average shot way up, to 33.3 weeks – and Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” has been on the charts the longest, at a whopping 81 weeks. Furthermore, artists appear to be occupying multiple spots on the Top 10 more often than in the past. In 2025, there are two repeat artists on this week’s top 10: Bruno Mars (who features on two songs) and Kendrick Lamar (who occupies the first, third, and fourth spots). There were certainly times in 2020 when big releases led to new albums occupying several slots on the top 10, but these “takeovers” usually only lasted a few weeks.

While there have not been many total “takeovers” (in which an artist occupies every spot in the Top 10) in 2024 and 2025, there have been several instances in which an artist occupied multiple spots for multiple weeks at a time. For example, Sabrina Carpenter held three spots on the Top 10 for eight weeks between September and November 2024. This phenomenon may imply that, paradoxically, the growing “long tail” and fragmentation of consumption makes it easier for big hits to last longer today. Listeners are increasingly fragmenting into niches and listening to the top artists within their circle rather than mainstream hits. This fragmentation may be making the top 40 charts less competitive as the previous “mainstream crowd” is now split among hundreds of smaller artists, creating opportunities for the rare superstar hits to top the charts – and stay at the top.

In the last “DNA of a hit” blog, the comparison spanned 20 years. But popular music is evolving so rapidly that even a comparison of the last five years reveals a cultural shift. Despite music streaming platforms adding tens of thousands of songs every day (and in other ways, because of it), a relatively small number of songs are continuously dominating the Top 10. This may also point to consumers increasingly gravitating towards songs and artists they already know rather than discovering a larger variety of new music en masse. As consumer behaviour continues to evolve and fragment over the next five years, the Top 10 may become less a snapshot of what everyone is listening to and more what particularly high-streaming niches are listening to.