Devon Powers says there is one significant data point no one has considered in the debate around 2025’s Song of the Summer, or rather, why there doesn’t really seem to be one this year: Donald Trump.
As media has become less centralized—music streamers replaced radio stations, TikTok killed the music video, and so on—how people consume music, and who they listen to, has become even more fragmented. But today, Trump represents a reawakened avatar of cultural togetherness and may be the closest thing in our society we have to a monoculture. In the US, he is the one entity a majority of people have all fervently rallied around, be they for or against what he stands for.
His influence reaches far beyond the fractured political arena of Washington, DC, Powers says, and he could be having an effect on even the music charts. One of the reasons there is no song of the summer this year “may have to do with Trump in a weird way,” a figure whose shadow looms large and has everything “to do with the changing cultural dominant.”
“There was a lot of discussion towards the end of the election season and right after Trump got elected about did country music sort of predict Trump. And I think that there is something to that. There are now more conservative touch points in culture that people can’t really ignore the way that they were before,” she says, mentioning the Paramount+ show Yellowstone, the return of trad wives in pop discourse, and the MAHA movement. “It all fits into that.”
But there are also other culminating factors—a perfect storm of circumstances—that have contributed to an unpredictable summer for music.
For one, listening habits are again shifting on streaming services like Spotify and SoundCloud, where tastes are growing more eclectic, people are venturing outside their comfort zones, and loyalty to any one genre seems to be a dying trend. The industry is also suffering from what has amounted to an authenticity crisis over creative authorship as streamers are being inundated with AI slop, which has become a genre all its own. Then there’s the Trump of it all, whose domineering influence may represent a new version of monoculture that not even the music industry can evade.
Powers, who is a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan and author of On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future, says his influence could, in fact, be having an effect on the industry’s current direction. According to Luminate’s midyear survey on music trends, released last month, more music is being streamed than ever before, but overall growth has slowed globally.
In spite of that, Christian music is on the rise. The genre is evolving fast, both in how it’s defined and how it’s discovered.
“Traditionally, it existed in a fairly closed ecosystem, with limited distribution, niche promotion channels, and a very specific audience, especially in radio and retail,” says JJ Italiano, head of global music curation and discovery at Spotify. “But as younger, streaming-native listeners have become more dominant, there’s been room for a new wave of Christian and faith-driven artists to explore a broader sound.”
While the full MAGA-fication of music is still far off—rap and rock remain the most popular genres in the US by a wide margin—there has been a noticeable tide shift in consumer listening habits overall. Trump isn’t the only reason we don’t have a song of the summer, just the one nobody is talking about, Powers says.
Billboard launched its Songs of the Summer chart in 2010, and it entered the zeitgeist in 2012. The phrase itself is a “relatively recent vintage,” Powers says. The title has become a business proposition more than anything, a way of “branding music and our relationship to the summer season.”
Currently sitting at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 is “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, a YouTuber and founding member of Hype House, the former collective of Gen Z TikTok stars. The song is a choir-heavy ballad about love that echoes the rising wave of Christian music. But where Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” once defined the irresistible atmospheres of summers past, “Ordinary” is not necessarily what you’d consider song of the summer material. Songs like Warren’s, despite their chart dominance, don’t really capture the spirit of the season. It’s a change that may forecast the future of the industry.
“It’s harder to find cultural consensus overall,” says Dan Charnas, associate professor at New York University and author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. Summer isn’t as vital to the actual business model of the music industry as summer movies have been to the film industry, he says, which may explain why record labels aren’t necessarily jockeying for chart dominance in the same way they do in the fall. “Which doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Last year, Sabrina Carpenter defied the odds and created some seemingly ubiquitous musical moments. But convergence around one song is much harder in the streaming era when everyone is pretty much programming their own playlist.”
That could be natural evolution. Today, streaming accounts for 92 percent of all music consumption in the US. Evolutions are the only guarantee in music, and “the idea of a single ‘mainstream’ is expanding,” says Wyatt Marshall, senior director of music intelligence at SoundCloud. He believes listeners are becoming more “genre-agnostic.”
You’ve probably noticed some of that too. Despite a string of chart-worthy summer releases from acts as varied as HAIM, Burna Boy, Lorde, The Clipse—and even a surprise drop from Tyler, the Creator—listeners haven’t been able to reach a unified accord.
Some of that is due to ongoing genre fermentation, which has become a new constant. AI slop, for example, is overwhelming streamers, flooding platforms with bizarre song titles like “Make Love to My Shitter” and “Grant Me Rectal Delight,” mirroring the sounds of jazz and doo-wap with a terrifying proficiency. AI-generated bands like Velvet Sundown, which surpassed 1 million streams on Spotify, are finding substantial audiences online even as they raise legitimate questions about creative authorship. In June, an AI song landed on the US charts for the first time, reaching No. 44 on the TikTok Viral 50. The new genre of sound is posing questions over authenticity and authorship.
SoundCloud’s Marshall says he has also noticed a subtle shift in listening behavior. According to data the company shared with WIRED, only 43 percent of plays in the US have been to tracks released in the past 18 months—slightly down from the two previous summers. “It suggests listeners may be revisiting favorites or balancing discovery with nostalgia a bit more this summer,” which may also explain “recession pop,” the current resurgence of pop songs from the late 2000s.
TikTok and Instagram have been a huge factor in lasting relevance, or reigniting old favorites, as viral sounds help create long-term staying power. Before 2020, no tracks spent more than 40 weeks in the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Then the pandemic forced everyone inside and on TikTok. According to The Wall Street Journal, eight songs have since cleared that 40-week benchmark, including “Levitating,” by Dua Lipa, and “Lose Control,” by Teddy Swims.
One reason there may seem like there is less consensus this summer is because what’s actually happening is a “backlash to the last few summers,” Powers says. The explosion of social media in the 2010s and the rise of streaming—large cultural shifts that reengineered how people communicate, share, create, and come together—killed monoculture. That was the argument. But “those theories are incomplete,” Powers says.
Last year was all about the neon punk spirit of Charli XCX’s Brat. Before that was Barbenheimer, 2023’s joint box-office push behind summer blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer. Both were major marketing campaigns that “undercut the fragmentation argument because people will say, ‘Oh, we weren't fragmented last summer.’ No, we were super fragmented last summer. All the same technologies that existed then exist now. Maybe we were a little less focused on AI, but we had that moment of togetherness.” She says young people may have lost some faith in larger music movements tied to political campaigns, like Brat Summer, and be in search of something new this year.
In an age where mass consensus is dying out and divisions seem to be growing, fandoms ebb and flow, and often new genres, or even ones once relegated to niche audiences, grow in popularity. “Genres are more porous than ever,” Marshall says. “Listeners are more omnivorous, and fandom isn’t siloed to one style of music.”
On Spotify, Italiano says country music is also on the rise and is finding a wider base. It is “indicative of a younger generation being far more open to listening to music across a variety of genres as well as the constraints around what is considered country music continuing to fall away.”
“It’s not a complete changing of the cultural guard,” Powers says. “But I think that we’re still figuring out how to talk about this cultural moment.”
