Variety Names Hitmakers’ Top 25 Songs of 2024: ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy),’ ‘I Had Some Help’ and More

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Back in the day, you knew a song was a hit when you heard it everywhere. Well, at what passed for everywhere back in the day: blasting from open windows, backyards, cars, stores, boomboxes, maybe transistor radios (remember those?).

And when it made the jump to your younger sibling or cousin’s Walkman, that was the true certification. These days, things are both the same and very different: The public plays a bigger role than ever not only in making songs into hits, but getting them into the mainstream in the first place.

It’s like the old metaphor about a butterfly’s sneeze being the spark that leads to a hurricane thousands of miles away: One person puts a song on a TikTik video — new, old, niche, or an old hit our parents or grandparents rocked to on a Walkman or transistor radio — and it moves and moves until even the old-school gatekeepers have to pay attention because it’s about to be the biggest song in the country.

Consequently, for the past few years, the charts have been all about new artists and huge songs, and that trend was bigger than ever in 2024.