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Radio News: This year's song of the summer might be old

Jun 01, 2022 11:33 pm

Inside Radio guesses at what will become this year's song of the summer, the song endlessly heard on radios at street parties, around pools, and on vacations. Currently, Harry Styles' “As It Was” and Lizzo's “About Damn Time” are the song's most likely to become the song of the summer of 2022, according to radio industry experts. But the 2022 song of the summer might come from a previous year, "As catalog music has shown an increase in streaming since COVID, accounting for 70 percent of listening according to Luminate, streaming of current titles has fallen another 3.5 percent in 2022 to date," the story reports. Two songs of last year's summer, Dua Lipa's “Levitating” and Olivia Rodrigo's “Good 4 U,” rank number 24 and number 29, respectively, on the current Mainstream Top 40 airplay chart. “A combination of older streamers tuning in, younger listeners discovering decades-old hits through the explosion of social-video platforms like TikTok, and listeners turning to familiar tunes for comfort during the pandemic lockdowns all led to a rise in such nostalgia listening,” The Wall Street Journal's Anne Steele writes. So Billboard's Gary Trust says, “It’s hard for any one song or one sound to dominate streaming like it used to be.” Read more about this story at Inside Radio.