Happy new year!  

I’m so excited to be sharing with you my annual list of the Best Tracks of The Year and a brief essay. But I’m even more excited to be including, for the first time, terrific essays from each of my Gen Z daughters, Abigail and Amelia, with their own takes on the list and the year in music, which are, no doubt, more insightful (and more entertaining) than my own. Interestingly, each of them makes reference to the idea that this year’s music owed a real debt to the music of when they themselves were 14 years old—which is especially fascinating since they’re four years apart in age and thus were each 14 at a different time (2012 and 2016, respectively). Now that I think about it, I myself inevitably include a song or two each year on my list that recall the music that came out when I was 14. As Baddiel and Skinner and the Lightning Seeds once sang “I know that was then, but it could be again.”  So, stick with us;  there’s lots of value for your money coming up: 

STEVE’S MUSINGS: 

There was a ton of great pop music this year, with the music world so fragmented that I had trouble eliminating songs from a much larger list of 144 “finalists”  because every elimination felt like negation of an interesting micro-genre that reared its head but didn’t spread broadly. Did pop have a center this year? Sure, the superstars (starting with Taylor) were able to command mass attention, maybe more attention than ever, yet music fans can continue to go down an ever-greater number of niche rabbit holes without feeling they’re missing the main event. 

For my top song of the year, it was a photo finish between Cola Boyy’s alternate universe disco funk “Babylon” and Moonchild Sanelly’s “To Kill A Single Girl (Tequila)”, with Cola Boyy pulling it out in a squeaker. Sadly, “Babylon” is from Cola Boyy’s final album, with the eccentric pop genius taken from us far too young as a result of a spinal disease he’d lived with since childhood. By all means check out his work; His collab with the Avalanches, “Don’t Forget Your Neighborhood” which three years ago made my year-end list, is a pretty good place to start. Once upon a time, Cola Boyy would have been considered “outsider music”. But music production today has become so decentralized that the distinction between insiders and outsiders has blurred to the point of irrelevance.  

As for Moonchild Sanelly, she’s a great South African artist who refers to her music as “future ghetto funk,” and she made one of the most consistently satisfying albums, featuring catchy melodies, funky beats, and lyrics which fly the flag of female empowerment. I easily could have put multiple songs from Moonchild Sannelly’s album on my list, but I’m sticking to the “one artist, one song” rule this year. If you like something you hear, you know how to check out more from that artist. 

This year’s list features artists from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, the Middle East and Asia; and pop, rap, afrobeat, urbana, folk, rock, dance, country, jungle, and even Italian Brainrot meme music can be found. Bad Bunny’s dominance in 2025 is but the most dramatic example of the audience’s continued embrace of not only Latin sounds, but of non-English language artists being at the forefront of formal experimentation and innovation in pop. Rosalia is, of course another. It really is starting to feel like audiences have become fully habituated to being genre agnostic. 

And while you’ll find some of the year’s most popular songs on the list (Bad Bunny’s DtMF has nearly 1.3 billion streams on Spotify alone), you’ll also hear some songs that have yet to get their moment in the sun, like Lil Fame’s “Bout That Life” which has fewer than 12,000 Spotify streams. (But what you won’t find is APT., which I loved so instantly when it came out at the very end of last year that I made it one of my top tracks of 2024.) 

I feel the need to note that I included Chappell Roan’s “The Subway” on my list despite the fact that I find the song’s first 2 ½ minutes entirely pedestrian; however, my boredom is more than relieved every time I hear the last part of the song, which might be the most perfect 90 seconds of pop I heard all year.

As has always been my practice, I do not include records with which I’ve been involved professionally via our S-Curve label or my other endeavors on the list, out of an aversion to conflict of interest. But at the very bottom of the list you’ll find great songs from AJR, Daisy the Great, Andy Grammer, Avery Cochrane, Netta, Yola, Bruce Melodie and Ryley Tate, so I hope you’ll stick around ‘til the end. 

Finally, I no longer  need to make sure the list includes, as it has since 2013, my favorite hyperpop songs of the year (traditionally released on the late, lamented PC Music label), now that hyper pop is so firmly entrenched in the DNA of mainstream pop it even warranted its own Google doodle in June. How about that? 

And now for two much better essays (maybe even rebuttals):

PARENTS (SOMETIMES) JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND

By Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

My sister and I always butt heads with our dad about his list.  We have a lot of disagreements, the most persistent of which is about Jessie Murph. She has a very cilantro voice—delightful to Steve, but soap to us. (We’ve succeeded in knocking her out in the final round of cuts for the last 3 years, so you won’t see her on the playlist.)

This year, I submitted a few of my own nominations after seeing my dad’s initial selections. I am proud (and of course humbled) to share that a few made the cut. Among them are “Lonely Road” by Natalie Bergman, “APEROL SPRITZ” by Laundry Day, and “Mii MUSIC ft. WHATMORE” By Yoshi T. (Watch the Yoshi T. space in 2026. I predict big things.) 

Not all of my suggestions landed. He passed on Tyler Childers’ extraordinary album, Snipe Hunter, which features the first ever country song about how fun Australia is, as well as the somber age-gap love ballad “Oneida.” I blame the Childers omission on the fact that my dad first listened to these songs by holding his iPhone to his ear while using his other hand to eat beef jerky with a fork. Context is everything. 

One of my biggest disagreements with my dad this year was about BigXthaPlug. He and I both became enamored with the Texan country-rap crossover artist this year, as he graced various festivals and Jingle Balls in his shirtless glory.  But we wondered which of his songs deserved a place on the venerated Stevie G leaderboard. 

To me, the obvious pick was “Hell at Night,” a duet with Ella Langley. It’s a breakup revenge fantasy. On the verses, BigX lists all the shitty things he hopes will happen to his former paramour. 

Lyrics include: 

“I hope you meet the right person but y’all never get along.” 

“I hope you turn your heater on and it blow cold” 

“Hope you leave your car running’ at the store and it get stolen” 

“Hope you go deep into the woods and you make the wrong turn.” 

When I suggested “Hell at Night,” Steve balked. 

“I don’t like that one,” he said. 

Why? 

“The message isn’t nice.” 

Personally, I find the lyrics to “Hell at Night” funny. At one point he says he hopes when she thinks of him, she hears thunder—like he’s a Disney villain or something. And I don’t know what this gal did to deserve it all, but I trust BigX. Plus, it’s not like he wants her to die or anything. He just wants her to have a bad morning and one hell of a night! Is that so evil? 

But my dad is blessed with indelible optimism. His optimism is at turns infuriating and inspiring. He’s inclined to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and to wish the best for everyone. This includes me (slay) and my sworn enemies (flop). My dad would never wish for someone’s heater to blow cold. Brrr! Or for their car to be stolen. Expensive to replace! 

***

It’s clear my dad’s optimism gene was recessive. At 23, I can find ways to see even the most runneth-ing over cups as half-empty. But in my early years, I was pure sunshine. I was voted “Happiest Baby” at a Club Med once. 

Unfortunately, my good disposition peaked 10 years ago, in the best year of my life, 2016. 

Musically, that year was by far the best of my lifetime. There was Blonde, and then Anti, the last substantial projects from Frank Ocean and Rihanna respectively. There was Bon Iver’s 22, a million, Drake’s Views from the Six, and Beyonce’s Lemonade. Everything sounded sumptuous and new. Each album was also a movie, a movement, a mood—an option for how to be in the world. 

Most formatively for me, 2016 gave us the best version of Christian Kanye—ingenious gospel samples, a controlled performance of narcissism, and not one mention of going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” West dropped the masterpiece, The Life of Pablo, and then birthed a pious Chance the Rapper into the pop mainstream like a baby Jesus—buoyant with hope and faith. (Like Christ, Chance was crucified a few years later. Unlike Christ, he hasn’t been resurrected.) 

2016 was also the year I started high school. It was the first year of my life when a person’s music taste could earn them social popularity and a cool reputation. By that I mean, it was the first year of my life when I enjoyed social popularity and a cool reputation.

It was, moreover, the last year of Obama-era idealism (until Q4 of course). Hamilton won the Tony. It felt like we were on an endless continuum of progress. I thought we’d soon have a female president. I thought I might one day own a pair of Yeezys. 

I thought I’d keep getting more socially popular and reputationally cool, and never have a pimple again.  Maybe everyone just thinks the year they graduate from middle school to high school is the greatest year of all time. 

Will 2026 be 2016’s sequel? Will we find a progressive hope that doesn’t evaporate? Will hip hop and r&b top the charts again? Will we get ambitious auteur albums that shine when listened to all the way through? With songs as perfect as “Love on the Brain,” or “Self Control”? Will somebody invite me to the Great Lawn where I will see a Juul for the first time, and freak out? Probably not. 

I guess the cultural cycle doesn’t make neat, decade-long rotations. 

Instead, we seem to be getting echoes of millennial indie music, and I predict they’ll explode in the new year. Amelia’s note really covers this, but I do want to highlight the fact that Wolf Parade’s uplifting 2005 alt anthem “I’ll Believe in Anything” is going viral right now, thanks to a really good gay kiss scene set at the Stanley Cup in Heated Rivalry. I can only assume it will inspire copycats, and  soon enough, we’ll all be getting vintage bicycles, or tiny tattoos, or tiny tattoos of vintage bicycles.

Zohran Mamdani, the quintessential millennial optimist, might also be part of the trend. But, come to think of it, a former Soundcloud rapper running the city is the most 2016 thing there is—so maybe we will have a very Abigail’s-Freshman-Year 2026 after all. 

***

At the very least, good won over evil on my dad’s list. He skipped “Hell at Night” and included BigX’s breakthrough hit, “All the Way,” featuring Bailey Zimmerman. It doesn’t quite have the sparkle of “Hell at Night,” in my opinion, but it does the job. 

In Steve’s spirit, I’ll end with a “nice message”—a few optimistic reminiscences on the year in music. 

Tyler coughed up Chromakopia AND Don’t Tap the Glass, and Bieber surprised with SWAG AND SWAG II. Both proved that established artists don’t have to become fashion moguls or Nazis or judges on The Voice. They can keep innovating, dig deep, and work at high volume, if not at peak performance. 

Meanwhile, HAIM learned a new dance! Al Roker was one of ROLE MODEL’s Sallys!! Turnstile, the Baltimore hardcore band, blew up! Taylor Swift was not eligible for any Grammys! And white middle aged guys—a long-suffering bunch—received the gift of Geese! 

I think we had at least a little bit of fun, right? 

As we head into the new year, I’ll leave you with some wisdom from the country music pantheon: 

When you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you go deep into the woods, and you make a wrong turn <3 

2025: A PRETTY 2012 YEAR FOR MUSIC

By Amelia Sylvor Greenberg

A newspaper once called my dad a tween guru. He’s not answering my texts to remind me which one because he’s in Vegas for Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve, but I guess I can’t argue with it. In addition to being the proliferator of inarguable Tiger Beat-style juggernauts like Hanson and The Jonas Brothers, he also said things when I was a tween that I found very compelling. I am of course referring to the catchphrase that he manufactured around 2013, “Love, Love, Love”, later abbreviated to LLL. (He held a private contest to pick the new catchphrase, where it won over “Suh-weet” and “Man” pronounced with a very long “A”. Everyone in our family voted.) I also remember the almost cheekily banal title of his best-of list from 13 years ago: “2012: A Pretty Good Year for Music”.  

“A pretty good year for”, and variations, has taken on a life of its own in my personal lexicon. Restaurants serving more wedge salads than they used to? Guess it’s a pretty good year for ICEBERG. The Grammys? That’s a pretty good NIGHT for music. If I’m trying to listen to Elvis Costello’s cover of George Jones’ 1970 country ballad “A Good Year for the Roses”, nine times out of ten I’m searching up “A PRETTY Good Year for the Roses” out of sheer habit. 

But was 2012 (and its siblings, the years 2009 to 2013) pretty good for music? From where I sit, totally. It was the era of recession pop, or “Bar Mitzvah Bangers” as they’re called on the Upper West Side, which was brought to a close in 2012 with tracks like “Starships” (RIP Nicki Minaj) and “Sexy and I Know It” (RIP the concept of the uncle-nephew nepo-baby duo). I’m not arguing that “Sexy and I Know It” was pretty good for music, but maybe I am? Sue me! (RIP the inclusion of Audrey Hobert on my dad’s 2025 list; where is she, Steve?!?) Outside the basement of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, it was a pretty indie time for pop. In 2012 we received both baby’s first Jack Antonoff with “We are Young” and baby’s last Gotye with “Somebody That I Used to Know”. We bore witness to exports from the indie sleaze division of the Warped Tour factory like “Everybody Talks” by Neon Trees, or the entire concept of Gym Class Heroes getting a second chance. Stomp-clap music was born (“Ho Hey” anybody?). The blogospheres were nursing their Black Keys hangover with a hair-of-the-dog shot of Beach House, and the tumblrinas were gearing up for the second coming of The Arctic Monkeys. Basically, our kicks were pumped up and our tongues were tied, you feel me? 

If you do, then you’re in luck, because oh my god is it 2012 again, which is well reflected on my dad’s 2025 list. When listening, I was struck by all the crazy analogous entries. “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” by Hemlocke Springs could easily fit in on an early album by Marina, formerly of “& the Diamonds” (RIP), an artist who my dad showed no interest in when I tried to introduce him the first time around. “Babylon” by Cola Boyy (RIP in a real and earnest way) sounds like a sugared-up Ariel Pink from when he would get funky. “We Go To Russia” by Victor Jones possesses all the bloggy irony of a “Das Racist” track, but reskinned as like, Tom Waits or something. Tchotchke is Best Coast, Sombr is Grizzly Bear, Geese is Vampire Weekend at their most melancholic. I could go on. When listening to “God is Laughing at Me” by Caleb Hawley, “Hydroplaning at the Edge of the World” by destroyer, AND “Knockin Heart” by Hamilton Leithauser, I found myself exclaiming over and over again: you know what they say…Portugal. The Man. YES, I know Portugal. The Man is more of a late 2000s thing, but I’m picturing it in a soundtrack-to-HBO’s-Girls way (a show that’s also come back into vogue recently), which plants it firmly in early 2010s territory. 

The trend cycles are absolutely turbo-charged right now. Last year was all about indie sleaze, a decidedly 2005-2008 flavor of nostalgia. It was The Dare and rockstar girlfriend aesthetic and BRAT, so much BRAT. I can’t help but notice that lately the contents of my TikTok feed, which used to be littered with clips from Skins, collages of Cobrasnake photos, and Olson Twins distressed birkin inspo, has been replaced by Valencia-filtered montages of Greenpoint with the caption “oh to live here during the Obama Administration”, and the assertion that we will all be wearing chunky necklaces and moccasins in 2026. I went to the new American Apparel store (it’s called Los Angeles Apparel now, but we all know what they mean) in SoHo the other day, and the waistlines of the shorts sit firmly above the belly button, much to my chagrin. Something is in the air. Perhaps, as the Trump administration is firmly back and set to continue for what feels like a hundred million years, the people are craving the millennial optimism of pre-2014, but cannot dare to even dream of the raw “everything’s fine now” hedonism of the mid 2000s, preferring to find safety in the recession/housing market crash era of curated individualism, makin’ it work, and indie twee?

This brings me back to Recession Pop. Where is it? Doesn’t it stand to reason that in this particular throwback era, it would be here? WHERE IS THE GEN Z TAIO CRUZ (I scream into the void only to hear my echo 1000 times and get embarrassed for asking for such a thing)??? 2008-2012 was marked by massive party songs, which always took place in the club and were sung to the collective, the “we”. “We r who we r”, “When we drink we do it right, getting slizzard”, and other beautiful sentiments. Where is the “We” in 2025 pop? The dance pop on this year’s list, even when clubby sounding (though no clubs are ever mentioned), is intimate, dwelling on one-on-one interpersonal relationships, like Tinashe and her lame ex in “No Broke Boys”, or Pinkpanthress and her clandestine encounter on “Illegal”. Maybe it’s that young people are partying less (Gen Z drinks less than previous generations for health, social repercussions of social media, financial concerns, yadda yadda), so the need for a fat stupid rallying club banger about popping bottles and doing shots with like 100 other people just isn’t there. Maybe it’s that in such a divided political climate (cringe) it’s hard to imagine uniting as a “we”, even if it’s just to light it up like it’s dynamite. I don’t know. Maybe. I do hope that recession pop makes a return in the coming year. I mean, if we’re having a recession anyway. What are they supposed to play at the Bar Mitzvahs? “The Subway”? You can’t grind to that! 

I hope that everyone has a happy and healthy 2026! If you need me, I’ll be walking through McCarren park, en route to get a latte with elaborate foam art of a man in a bowler hat and mustache, which is also what the barista who’s making said coffee will look like. Maybe I’ll even pick up a cronut or a ramen burger while I’m out. YOLO. Kony 2012. 

(Note from Steve: Back in the early teens, we used to sing at home a parody of the 60’s doom-pop song “In the Year 2525” updated to the 2012-2016 club aesthetic as “We’re Gonna Party In the Year 2525”, with lyrics like “In the year 4545, chillin’ in the VIP with a robot by my side”. Now the year 2525 is only 499 years away, so we’ll soon know whether people in that future time are at all in the partying mood.)

Here’s wishing everyone a great 2026. Let kindness reign. 

Cheers,

Steve

Hi everybody, 

With about 100,000 songs being uploaded to Spotify et. al. every day, it’s inevitable that at least some of it must be really good, and that you can find great stuff if you look hard enough. I managed to hear a ton of excellent music this year, so much so that I had a really hard time limiting my best-of list this year to 50 songs, having started with a “shortlist” of 125 songs and then sadly eliminating most of them until I got to the final list. But ruthlessness paid off, and I think every song on this year’s list is truly special. 

But before we turn to the list, first a bit of housekeeping, and then an essay on what to expect from the meeting of music and AI, which is likely the most important development in music creation in our lifetimes. 

1. O SOLO MIO 2024 UPDATE

In last year’s essay, I noted the fact that there have been fewer and fewer songs by duos or groups on the year-end Billboard Hot 100 every year over the past decade or so, a trend which accelerated with the rise of tiktok as the main source of pop music discovery. 2023’s year-end Hot 100 featured only two groups, which was at that point an all-time low. I won’t rehash the reasons for this, which you can read in the piece I wrote last year, but I do feel the need to point out that on 2024’s year-end Hot 100 Singles chart, there isn’t a single new record by a duo or group (the multitude of songs with features don’t count as actual duos or groups for our purposes) This has never happened before, and there’s no way, chart-wise, for this Hot 100 record ever to be broken, so I thought I’d make note of it here.* 

*Well, there’s one group on the year-end Hot 100: Wham!’s 1984 holiday evergreen “Last Christmas”, which now annually appears on the Billboard year-end list along with other seasonal chestnuts by artists such as Brenda Lee and Mariah Carey. But that anomaly doesn’t negate the fact that the contemporary Hot 100 has no place for groups. 

2. AY AY AY! AI

Much has been written this year about the potential impact of generative AI on music creation and the music business, and I imagine 2025 will be the first year where consumers begin to regularly and knowingly interact with music that has been created using AI. So I would like to devote this year’s essay to the future of musical creativity in an AI world. (This essay is adapted from a talk I delivered at Dartmouth University’s Neukom Institute For Computational Science this fall. The entire talk can be found here)

One critique I often hear levied at AI-generated music at this early stage that AI-generated music is not “real” music, as it’s been “artificially” created by technology.  So let’s start with the question of what is real music, anyway? With the exception of the human voice itself, and I suppose playing percussion by clapping and stomping your feet, pretty much all other music created by humans uses some technology invented by humans. And pretty much all of those new technologies whether they were drums or electric microphones or flutes or synthesizers caused listeners a little bit of confusion at first encounter. So too with AI. 

Ultimately, every one of the above named innovations changed the way music was played and introduced new types of music that COULD be played. It’s no coincidence, for instance, that the electric guitar was invented just a couple of years before the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll. In the 60s and 70s, synthesizers were developed that created new sounds that literally no one had ever heard before in music. At the time they were considered weird novelties, but today they’re very much part of the palette of popular music.  The same is true of digital sampling that became popular at the dawn of the hip-hop era. And autotune on vocals at the dawn of this century.  

Autotune originally was invented  as a way for singers who were less than perfect to cheat on their recordings, but now it’s just a tool, the way an electric guitar is a tool that makes an interesting sound and causes different music to be made than would’ve been made without it. New technology inevitably leads to new forms of music. And we generally can’t guess in advance what they might be. 

While AI will have a profound impact on the future of music, it is likely that its real contribution won’t be deep fakes like the 2023 Drake/Weeknd mashup, the cause of much fear in the music industry upon its release.  While there’s novelty right now to the idea of being able to make music that sounds just like your favorite recording artist, I suspect that ultimately imitating famous musicians will be akin to imitating famous painters. If I told you that I made new paintings that have perfectly imitated the style of Picasso or van Gogh, you might be curious for a second, but you wouldn’t hang them in a museum. Nobody values forgeries. 

While you could imitate famous musicians, you couldn’t really do it in a way that was genuinely creative or as moving as the genuine works created by those actual people. And there’s a reason for this: Songwriters and recording artist don’t work in a vacuum. A person might write a song about flowers, but maybe that songwriter just had an argument with somebody and that fact informs the mood of the song, or maybe they stubbed their toe or just read something in the news that upset them or delighted them, and a million other things, and all those things at that moment impact the songwriter’s mood and the mood of everyone else involved in the creative process, and that impacts the song– that stuff of life is what humans bring to the equation.  So, telling an AI to write a song about flowers in the style of Taylor Swift? Well, Taylor Swift never wrote a song in a vacuum and there’s no such thing as a generic Taylor Swift song, but that’s what you’d get, and that’s what the Drake/Weeknd mashup was. Every piece of creative work generated by any creative person is generated within a complex series of specific circumstances being experienced by the artist and their team at that moment.

Certainly, using synthetic vocals or music generated by AI in the style of a famous artist can have value if the human creator brings something new and exciting to the table. This kind of creative endeavor might even come to be considered the musical equivalent of fan fiction. Did you make a song with generative AI using, say, the voice of Elvis Presley as an interesting-sounding texture, or maybe that voice is singing the hook to a style of music that didn’t exist in Elvis‘s lifetime? In that instance, Elvis‘s voice becomes similar to when you sample a drum break from a James Brown record and loop it, and use it as the foundation of a hip-hop record. 

But that sort of usage is ultimately the sideshow. What’s the “real” use of generative AI going to be in music? How will the technology be used to create something that could not have been created using previously available technology? For instance, the major labels are envisioning a future where a majority of the music featured on social media platforms like TikTok will not be professional music, but will be user generated music, done with the involvement of AI. I’m not referring here to users making things that sound like Taylor Swift, but rather users just making their own original music, no matter how good or bad it is, by feeding prompts to AI programs. That will likely be a major new form of expression for average music fans, 

Users will be able to make all those new songs for their tiktoks because generative AI is potentially the most powerful utility ever put in the hands of musical creators. It is a utility whose sheer computing power allows the creative process to unfold much more quickly, and in some cases that ENABLES doing things that would be far too daunting for a human to even attempt alone. Cassie Kozyerkov, Google’s former chief decision scientist, explained it to me another way: She suggested that generative AI is like a drug for a creative person, allowing the artist to put on a pair of goggles that allows him or her to see things in a whole new way by presenting the artist with a potentially endless number of possibilities to consider, that the artist never would have imagined on their own. 

In my lifetime, the single biggest evolution in music-making was the switch from analog music to digital music. We transitioned from playing music which required physical skills— you had to actually learn to play a guitar or a piano or a trumpet and that required some physical skill that you had to master, using some part of your body, and suddenly with digital music you didn’t. These days, any music you can imagine you can make happen on your computer—and the new additional tool, AI,  will further broaden what you could do, using even fewer physical skills. 

But while you won’t need physical skill, what you will still need to make truly great music is creative talent. 

Just as you still need talent to make worthwhile music on your computers, you’ll need it when you use AI if you want to make something that has the ability to truly move people in an original way. Greatness still requires spark. And taste. I had a discussion about this recently with Amanda Goodspeed, Meta’s former head of creativity, who emphasized how crucial taste is to the creation of art. In fact, taste is what ultimately makes an artist. It’s as important as pure musical skill when you’re trying to make music of value. 

And that’s because art is mostly about making choices. Generative AI can make thousands of choices incredibly quickly, but it can’t exercise artistic taste.  At least not yet.  So, as humans and generative programs begin to collaborate more, it’s likely that AI will start to serve as a kind of sounding board for human ideas as well as making its own musical suggestions. Part of a feedback loop. Both the human and the AI will be making and evaluating each other’s suggestions.

AI could easily spit out some catchy soundalike Taylor Swift song on its own–and we know it’s already creating the kind of low-engagement music that gets used behind scenes in TV shows or in youtube advertisements. But on its own, it’s not producing music that comes from the heart—the music that results from the creativity and skills of talented people coming together. 

Not everybody agrees about this point, by the way. Chris Mattman, a former NASA engineer who I spoke with recently, believes that generative AI will eventually learn the creative process itself. He believes that if you give AI the infinite catalog of songs that it will, over time, internalize the very idea of taste and begin to emulate it. 

What generative AI will certainly lead to is new genres of music, and maybe even new musical sounds. AI can generate lots and lots of terrible ideas really quickly that can then be dismissed by the AI or a human creator until something with promise emerges, and then the human can work with the AI to refine that, so it becomes a sound that might be appealing to people. I could, for instance, say to a generative AI program, I want you to come up with a brand new musical instrument sound that no one’s ever heard before, but that people will really like. And there’s a chance that at some point in the process of doing this, a new musical sound will emerge that will change music the same way the electric guitar or the synthesizer changed music. 

What does this creative revolution means for the music industry? Generative AI is able to create new music because it’s ingested millions of pieces of musical information by scraping the Internet for any musical sounds it can get access to. A lot of this music is under copyright and owned by someone. So, even if a generative AI program created a brand-new piece of music that didn’t sound anything like Drake or The Weeknd or Taylor Swift, or any existing artist or piece of music, that AI program was still trained on lots and lots of copyrighted music.  And that’s why music companies will want to get paid for all those future new songs created by average music fans for tiktok using AI.

One way to describe all the music that goes into the creation of AI music is by thinking of AI music creation as sampling on steroids. Essentially, AI is using micro samples from countless songs to come up with something new. Instead of a few samples on a record, like in hip hop, there’s millions and millions of them and you can’t even identify them because they’re so numerous and so micro, but they are there.  The music industry long ago figured out how to get paid when artists use their material as samples in new recordings. And now the industry is determined to get paid for the raw material that goes into the training of generative AI. Remember, it doesn’t matter if the output resembles your copyrighted music. What’s important is what went into the program.

Imagine a giant pile of cement, that just looks like a big dust pile–and then imagine a skyscraper. That pile of cement looks nothing like a skyscraper, and yet the skyscraper couldn’t have been made without using the pile of cement. And the builder, presumably, has paid for the pile of cement. Right now, the music industry is highly focused on getting paid for their pile of cement.  

The concept of whether using large data sets of copyrighted music without permission in order to train AI would be permitted as fair use under US copyright laws is currently being tested in court via lawsuits, including one suit by Universal Music Publishing, and a few other music publishers, who’ve sued Anthropic for infringement. But it’s unclear how these suits will be decided. 

But rather than relying on lawsuits, the major music companies’ emerging position is one of  “OK we’ll give you permission to train your models—and you’re going to pay us. We’ll license our music to you and we’re going to get a royalty on every piece of new music that gets generated.” And because so much new music is going to get generated, even that micro-royalty is going to add up and be a significant revenue opportunity for the music business. 

That’s what’s most tantalizing about this imagined future: It’s all going to happen at scale. In the next few years, much more music is going to be created than was ever created in the entire history of mankind. We’re going to experience new sounds and new genres, and at a certain point the question will be “what’s the rate limit for the human ear–how many new genres can we consume? How do we sift through it all?” 

The NASA data scientist I mentioned earlier,  Chris Mattman, believes that pretty much anything you can imagine will ultimately come into being with generative AI because the difference between AI and you and I is that AI is all the humans, and you and I are each only one human. Generative AI has been trained on all the humans and on all pieces of art. It’s been trained on data that’s not even public. It’s been trained on real people and on fictional characters. 

One thing that’s certain is that there will arise a new generation of music creators who will have direct access to the public, the same way that a generation of amateur video creators did a few years back, which really wasn’t possible before Youtube came along. And now, over 50% of all video consumed in the world comes from user-generated sources. A seismic change.  

For creative people, being in a collaborative process with AI will almost certainly be the dominant mode of engagement. Just as it’s no fun watching two computers play chess against each other, people who are interested in being creative won’t want to outsource that experience to machines. They’ll want to use machines as tools, not as replacements. The only people who are likely to want to turn over the entire process to generative models are people who in fact can’t offer much creativity in the first place, or don’t need what they’re trying to make to be very creative. 

The opportunity here for the music companies is that they already own the best databases of copyrighted songs. One course of action for them is to make their own AI generative model:  Turn their copyrighted material and metadata into very structured data in the form of tables with rows and columns, and then either sell that data to AI companies—sell bricks instead of cement–or start their own businesses that put that data to work. 

The six largest companies in the AI field, all tech companies, will have spent approximately $30 billion in the next 12 months acquiring data or licenses to intellectual property. So that’s the real opportunity for the music companies, not suing the AI business.  

And on top of the foundational AI models, we can imagine people building apps that will be compatible with those models. Today, the App Store is a $1 trillion economy, so you will absolutely see enormous amounts of revenue generated by new applications that get built, new consumer experiences, novel forms of entertainment, different business models. 

In 2023, there were 20 billion pieces of generative AI content created and during the first 90 days of 2024 there were nearly 100 billion creations using generative AI tools. We’re barely beginning to scratch the surface, the volume of AI created works is exploding, and it is likely that just as with video and user generated content, a majority of the music we consume in the near future will at the very least have been co-piloted by AI. 

Finally, for all those still worried that human beings will eventually be cut out of the creative process, let’s consider this:  Because so much AI generated music will exist in the future, there is a fear that in the future the ONLY new music AI will have to train on is AI created music. That would create a very big problem, called model collapse.  

AI models trained on human text or human sound can create high quality new products, but when you look at the statistical properties of those new songs or bits of text, you can tell they were produced by a model and not a person. Simply put, model collapse is when you try to train AI on things that were AI created, and at that point it all breaks down mathematically, because there aren’t the correct statistical properties to the inputs and you end up with degraded outputs. So, there’s an ongoing need for new human data. Thus, there will always be a role for new artists with new tastes, creating new music in new genres, with that music then being licensed out to train future AI models. You’ll always have to go back to humans for music to continue to move forward, or music will just stagnate. 

I don’t foresee a future where humans forfeit the music making process entirely to machines. Rather, the question that concerns me is: In the future will generative AI be a utility used by creative and talented humans, or will talented humans become a utility used by generative AI programs to provide fresh raw material? 

3. MY TOP 50 SONGS OF 2024

This year’s Top 50 list celebrates so many genres of pop music, from the loopy Euro-dance of “Pedro” to the contemplative twang of Adrianne Lenker, with lots of room for amapiano, afrobeat, rap, country, pure pop, and even a bluegrass record—by Swamp Dogg, no less! You’ll find big hits (“Espresso,” “A Bar Song,” etc.) and some you may never have heard but that I hope you like (“Omaha,” “No More Birthdays,” etc.).  The list nods to the ultimate triumph of hyperpop, the musical form introduced over a decade ago by the UK’s PC Music label. I’ve been including PC Music tracks on my annual lists since 2013, but the now-shuttered label’s influence became truly mainstream over the past few years, and in 2024 Charlie XCX’s ubiquitous “Brat” album, produced by PC Music founder A.G. Cook, landed hyperpop in the white-hot center of the pop music universe. A.G. Cook himself also makes the list with his solo track “Heartache,” and you can hear hyperpop’s influence on numerous tracks on my list. 

 I named “Angel of My Dreams” by Little Mix member Jade as my favorite track of 2024. In spite of the song reaching #2 on the UK singles chart, it failed to make a dent in the US, which is a shame, as “Angel of My Dreams” is a terrific combination of inescapable hookiness and formal experimentation, and it succeeds on both levels, a rarity in the pop singles game. It opens with a sample from Sandie Shaw’s 1967 Eurovision-winning “Puppet On a String,” but never returns to that musical motif again. Then, it hits you with a humongous hook before going berserk, heading off into multiple unexpected musical directions from pop to electroclash to dance, with every twist and turn being refreshing and utterly enjoyable.

Below you’ll find a Spotify playlist with my list of the Best Songs of 2024. Since I never include on the list artists with whom I directly work, you’ll find at the end of the list really terrific music from the likes of S-Curve’s Andy Grammer, Yola, Netta, the Moss, Daisy the Great, and Rwandan superstar Bruce Melodie. I hope you enjoy the list! 

 4. POST-SCRIPT: EXORDIUM & TERMINUS

Finally, I do want to note that the arrival of 2025 means we are exactly 500 years away from The Year 2525, the dystopian future described in Zager & Evans’ 1969 #1 hit. Let the countdown begin, and let’s hope we surpass expectations. 

In the meantime, have a great new year!

Cheers,

Steve

I greatly enjoyed so much music in 2023, and my Best Of list runs the gamut from pure pop to r&b, country, alt rock, rap, and even a European dance record with funny, nostalgic French lyrics. But before we get to the list, a couple of observations about the year in pop:

1. O SOLO MIO

A trend that’s been building for the past few years, but which has now become undeniable, is the decline of groups, duos, and bands on the pop scene. While there are endless collaborations between stars with independent careers, the 2023 Billboard Year-End Hot 100 features just two bona fide groups (not counting Wham’s 80’s Xmas track and 90s group Aqua’s cameo on the Barbie track): Those are Texas band Grupo Frontera, whose regional Mexican stylings scored two spots on the year-end chart, and country band Old Dominion. Pop groups, r&b/hip-hop groups and rock bands are entirely absent. Of course, there are still rock bands on the alternative chart, but none crossed over to the pop chart in a big enough way this year to make the year-end Hot 100.  And no hip-hop groups have broken through to take the place of the departed Migos. As for boy bands and girl groups, the only corner of the pop world still featuring those configurations is K-Pop. (As recently as 2021, BTS was the biggest-selling singles act in the world, but they’re on hiatus.) And while dedicated K-Pop fans boosted a number of albums to debuts at number one on the US album chart, none had dominant pop singles. 

Ten years ago, there were 27 duos or groups on the Billboard year-end chart. If you care to go back 50 years, there were 46. But there’s been an accelerating decrease in recent years: 

NUMBER OF SONGS BY DUOS/GROUPS ON BILLBOARD YEAR-END HOT 100:

2017: 19

2018: 17

2019: 13

2020: 7

2021: 7

2022: 4 

2023: 3

So, the question is: What happened to the duos and groups? There are a few answers.

For starters, the influence of rock, and consequently rock bands, on the pop scene has declined dramatically. Those 46 groups on the 1973 chart were overwhelmingly rock bands, influenced by the model made popular by the Beatles, plus a smattering of R&B vocal groups. And the 2013 crop featured such alt/pop/rock artists as Imagine Dragons and Maroon 5. But the decline of rock crossover doesn’t adequately explain the disappearance of all kinds of duos and groups from the pop scene. Where’s today’s Destiny’s Child or Outkast? 

There’s no doubt that the isolation wrought by the pandemic influenced the decline of groups in 2020 and 2021. What enabled solo artists to flourish in that lonely period was the increasing availability and affordability of home digital audio workstations such as Ableton. And, having discovered how easy it is to make music by yourself at home, many artists have abandoned the notion of collaboration, which is not only more of a logistical hassle, but also necessitates compromising with others on vision. 

Further, social media has abetted the decline of groups on the pop scene. A platform like Tiktok favors confessional, diaristic content—perceived intimacy and individual self-expression—with the best TikToks working as though your friend is talking to you on FaceTime. It is simply more difficult for groups to get together in the same place and brainstorm content that doesn’t seem contrived than it is for individuals. Plus, the TikTok algorithm, built around portrait-mode video, favors a single face looking at the camera more than a group, making it less likely that content created by groups (except dance groups) will travel as widely . Of course, since social media favors solo artists, and record companies in large part base artist signings on social media success (the surest way to generate streams on DSPs), more solo artists are being signed. Thus, the trend is self-reinforcing and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. 

The reality show singing groups who attained pop stardom a decade ago—One Direction, Fifth Harmony—would have trouble getting traction today on social media, where being seen as an “industry plant” is poison. So would the types of boy bands and girl groups that pop Svengalis once assembled. In the modern pop world, it has become necessary for an aspiring musical talent to have their audience embrace the idea that they are an “artist”, however defined, as they began to share content. Their output–-both musical and non-musical–-needs to be seen as the authentic expression of their artistic vision, and their songs should convey something that gives the audience a peek into some aspect of the artist’s life or outlook. That’s why songs not at least co-written by the artists themselves have mostly gone the way of the dodo bird. And on TikTok, it’s easier to pull this off solo.

The reason K-Pop groups can still thrive is that in K-Pop culture, singers in groups are more precisely categorized as entertainers than artists, as singers in the West were categorized for much of pop music history. Thus, the old star-making machinery—auditioning members, styling them, teaching them choreographed moves and providing professionally crafted pop songs—is embraced as part of the show. But still, the most successful K-Pop artists are those whose individual members can develop an identity and inspire personal loyalty from fans. This is why so many members of K-Pop groups have been able to be spun off for successful solo careers. 

The decline of the group doesn’t mean that hits are left in the hands of single individuals, however. The 2023 year-end Hot 100 contains 33 songs in which individual artists collaborate. The collaborators maintain their own careers and their own social media identities, and borrow each other’s audiences as a matter of art or marketing.  It’s worth noting that in the Grammy category “Best Pop Vocal by a Duo or Group” every one of this year’s nominees is a collaboration between two or more artists with their own separate careers. There are no actual ongoing duos or groups nominated. 

Finally, in wondering what the immediate future might look like for groups, we need look no further than the most lauded new group of the year, boygenius. An indie supergroup featuring three successful artists, they, much like the R&B duo Silk Sonic, are a group whose members, having first built their own solo careers, forged their own identities and garnered the allegiance of their own fans, joined forces as collectives. 

We’ll probably see a few more supergroups in the coming years or two, and not so many groups emerging from thin air. But the media ecosystem keeps evolving, and the current TikTok-driven pop scene is bound to give way to something new eventually, as it always does. 

2. WONDER WOMEN

Female artists certainly dominated in 2023. Taylor Swift’s cultural ubiquity and the mammoth tours by both Swift and Beyonce towered over the music landscape. And beyond those two behemoths, women were behind so much of the year’s most important music, issuing an emphatic rejoinder to former Grammy chief Neil Portnow, who obtusely suggested in 2018 that women “who have the creativity in their hearts and souls” needed to “step up.” Well, women haven’t merely been ‘stepping up” in pop music for quite a while; they’ve been grabbing the mic and sharing messages of empowerment, independence, and strength, expressed in styles ranging from pop to r&B, rap, and country. 

When I perused my best-of list after exhaustive culling (it could have been twice as long), I realized that 43 of the 60 songs on the list prominently feature a female artist. And that’s without including SZA’s magnificent “Kill Bill,” which sat at the top of my 2022 list and thus was ineligible for inclusion this year. But don’t worry, SZA is well represented as a featured artist on a few entries here. And the list encompasses both the most popular 2023 singles featuring women–Calm Down” by Rema feat. Selena Gomez has 1.2 BILLION Spotify streams–and some undiscovered gems such as “A Woman’s Fault” by Dear Dear, with 74k Spotify streams. 

I named Miley Cyrus’ “When We Were Young” as my favorite single of 2023. Year-end accolades and Grammy love have been heaped upon her prior single release, “Flowers,” one of the biggest hits of the year—it has more than ten times as many Spotify streams as “Used To Be Young”—but I fall into the camp that finds “Flowers” a bit too derivative of Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man”(which, incidentally, was on my “Best Tracks of 2013” list). In my estimation, “Used To Be Young” is the most perceptive, self-aware and mature song Miley has released to date, as 31-year-old Cyrus steps into a new stage of adulthood with no regrets about her hard-partying past. Cyrus’ candid songwriting about aging is a triumph in an industry that has never let female artists move out of adolescence gracefully. It is also an anomaly in 2023, dubbed “year of the girl”, in which renderings of protracted teen girl-dom captivated the masses. 

Below is my list of the Best Songs of 2024. Since I never include on the list artists with whom I directly work, you’ll find at the end of the list really terrific music from the likes of AJR, Netta, Andy Grammer, the Moss, Daisy the Great, Jabez, and Rwandan superstar Bruce Melodie featuring dancehall legend Shaggy. I hope you enjoy the list! 

Have a happy 2024! 

Steve

So, the following conversation sums up the state of music in 2022 for me.

Two young women—sisters, in fact—one age 24 and the other age 20, in New York City:

20-year-old: “The only thing I’m getting on my TikTok lately is Noah Kahan’s ‘Stick Season.’ I get TikToks using the track, covers by other Tiktokers. Not that I mind; I like the song.”

24-year-old: “Let me see what you’re talking about. (Looks at 20-year old’s TikTok and hears Noah Kahan’s ‘Stick Season’.) Nope, I have never been served a TikTok using that song. Never heard it before.

2022 was the year TikTok brought fragmentation of the pop audience to a whole new level. Fragmentation has typically been the end destination of platforms that started out new and mass—television, music radio, even Youtube. At first, these platforms establish themselves by aggregating as large an audience as possible, focusing on content with broad appeal. Eventually, in order to maximize advertising revenue, the strategy changes, with hyper-targeting of particular populations taking the place of endeavoring to come up with an offering that will please everyone. In earlier times, this fragmentation went hand in hand with the emergence of increasingly sophisticated audience research, which allowed for greater precision in targeting audience subgroups. These days, with TikTok taking the lead, what was once known as audience research has been replaced by the algorithm.

As it gets ever more sophisticated at serving you what it is pretty sure you want to see/hear, TikTok’s algorithm has obliterated the audience subgroup and has instead focused on hyper-targeting the individual.  So, in a few decades media has gone from looking for something that everyone will like, to looking for something that some desired audience slice will like, to looking for something that YOU will like.

No doubt, this state of affairs leads to a highly satisfying experience for some individuals. But when you pull back the lens, what’s missing from the picture is the excitement of a widely shared culture. Perhaps you don’t personally care for the mass, but I’d argue that pop culture is at its most fun when everyone can sing—and dance— along as one big community. In today’s climate, those big pop explosions of the past, from Elvis and the Beatles all the way to Call Me Maybe and Gangnam Style, become ever more elusive. I’ll venture a bet that there will never again be a TikTok-generated phenomenon on the level of Old Town Road, because TikTok itself has gone from being a mass medium to being a hyper-targeted one.

But fear not; if the thrill and creative jolt of mass culture is something you value, there surely will be a new platform somewhere down the line which will emerge to enable that mass culture, at least at first. Pop culture loves the mass, and, like water finding its level, it will always find ways to enable the mass’ resurgence. It’s always the new platform that puts the pieces of the audience back together after they’ve been broken apart. Decades ago, when observers of the culture lamented fragmented FM radio formats making a phenomenon on the order of Beatles a relic of the past, it was cable television—in the form of MTV—that put the pieces of the audience back together again, with the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson emerging almost immediately. Youtube served this unifying function for a brief period a decade ago, with the aforementioned Carly Rae Jepsen and Psy records reaping the immediate benefit. In 2019 it was the then-novel TikTok which coalesced around Lil Nas X’s debut, proving its agenda-setting powers by making “Old Town Road” ubiquitous. But like all platforms before it, TikTok learned it could maximize its own profits by focusing on as narrow a slice of the audience as possible. And for TikTok, the narrowest slice possible is the individual.

For the moment, TikTok rules pop. The music industry has no real choice but to go with the flow, signing new artists who show signs of life on the platform and marketing new music using strategies that acknowledge the fact that without first garnering success on social media (TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, mainly), it will be a steep challenge for an artist to benefit much from the things a record label can still do—radio, press, TV, advertising, tour support, etc.

As for the artists themselves, they’re left to take on a lot of the hard work of marketing their music themselves, because social media virality can’t really be manufactured by a record label. This is a significant change from the role of artists in previous eras, where the artist provided the creativity and charisma, while the label did the heavy lifting on the marketing front without expecting the artist to have a talent for that part of the process, as well.

To make things even more challenging for artists, the TikTok algorithm disfavors posts by artists that don’t post regularly enough. Thus, if an artist wants to reach as large a chunk of your audience as possible with the post they really want to send, they need to keep stoking the fire by posting regularly, regardless of whether those posts are really what they most care about communicating, or whether that’s how they want to spend their time. Some artists bristle at this, saying “I’m not a content creator, I’m an artist!”. But in that sense, they are no different than the established artists of the early 1980s who didn’t want to make music videos when MTV came along: “I’m no actor, I’m a musician!” But soon enough, most of those artists realized that there was a new game being played, and they needed to get good at it to continue to have hits. It appears we’ve approached a similar junction.

And so, it’s beginning to feel as though artists have entered into a form of benign serfdom on TikTok, consistently creating content for the platform without remuneration, in the hopes that something might go viral, causing commerce to occur on other platforms. But also doing it whether they really want to or not, in order to keep the algorithm smiling upon them so they will not be penalized for not posting by seeing the posts that are important to them not reach as wide an audience due to inactivity. This is where a system in which content is not fed to your followers, but rather, recipients are chosen by TikTok’s own algorithm, has led.

At this point, I should offer full disclosure that as a music industry professional, I have experienced the thrill of having numerous projects with which I’ve been involved win the TikTok lottery, becoming huge hits when they almost certainly would not absent this platform. TikTok can now make things big faster and across greater distances than anything that’s come before. It’s really terrific for everyone involved when that magic happens; I just hope the industry can find ways of bringing the world great new music even when it doesn’t.

In any event, one can hardly blame TikTok if this status quo makes some artists or labels unhappy. TikTok isn’t in the music business any more than it’s in the dance business; music, like dance, is just one of many features that users include in much of the most popular content. And it’s not TikTok’s fault if other industry players, from DSPs to radio chains, are giving overwhelming weight to TikTok metrics to make programming decisions. But that is where things are right now.

Further, and importantly, there’s no doubt some terrific music has emerged from this state of affairs, made by artists who might not have gotten past the gatekeepers in the old system. And this should be celebrated. But I sure hope that we’re not headed irrevocably into a future where great artists and great music never get to be winners in the pop sweepstakes because they’re just not natural born marketers. Or because some kid in New Zealand didn’t come up with a funny dance to a random 30-second snippet from their recording.

As for my list of the 50 Best tracks of 2022, it’s pretty much all over the place.. A fragmented year leads to a plethora of styles represented. A huge range of relative popularity is here, too: Harry Styles’ “As It Was,” with over 1.7 BILLION Spotify streams is present, but so is “Walt Disney” by Jason Bajada, which weighs in with under seven thousand streams.

Fro my best track of the year, I’m going with Sudan Archives’ “Selfish Soul”, although it could just as easily have been the SZA or Drug Dealer songs that  are on my list. And as in years past, I don’t include songs from our S-Curve Records label or other songs with which I’ve been professionally involved on my list. But the very best of those songs can be found at the end of the playlist, since artists such as AJR, Andy Grammer, Daisy the Great, Netta, Jabez, and the Moss put out fantastic music in 2022 and deserve to take a bow.

Check out the playlist HERE!

‍Here’s wishing you a great 2023!