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The Contenders is a midweek column that looks at artists aiming for the top of the Billboard charts, and the strategies behind their efforts. This week, we take stock of the current Song of the Summer race, which is tighter this year than the past few, thanks to sparring smashes between Post Malone & Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey, Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter.
Post Malone feat. Morgan Wallen, “I Had Some Help” (Mercury/Big Loud/Republic): A couple months ago, it seemed like a pretty safe bet that Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” would reign all season on Billboard’s Songs of the Summer chart. The song blasted to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 immediately upon its May release – zooming past an unusually stacked array of major hits in the top 10 at the time — with staggeringly big numbers across the board. As radio airplay picked up for it at a blinding pace and its sales and streaming numbers stayed strong, it looked like it might follow the path of Wallen’s 2023 smash, “Last Night,” which both started and ended the season atop the Songs of the Summer chart, while reigning for four total months on the Hot 100.
And in truth, it still very well might. “I Had Some Help” has ruled the Songs of the Summer chart for all eight weeks of the list’s 2024 existence thus far, and has topped the Hot 100 for six frames, as well. Its numbers remain strong in all areas: On this week’s charts (dated July 27), it remains in the top five on Radio Songs (No. 1, its fourth week atop the chart) Streaming Songs (No. 3) and Digital Song Sales (No. 4). It’s still gaining on the airwaves, and should get an extra late-summer boost when Posty releases his long-anticipated full country album, F-1 Trillion (due Aug. 16).
But “I Had Some Help” has had some competition. After towering over the rest of the Hot 100 for its first five weeks of release, “Help” briefly ceded the crown to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please.” Then after recapturing it the next week, “Help” again let the title slip the following frame — and in the two weeks since, it’s yet to reclaim it, as Shaboozey and Kendrick Lamar have taken turns trading off the top spot.
Which is hardly to say that “Help” has fallen off dramatically or unexpectedly: It’s naturally experiencing a slow decrease in streams and sales, but it’s also still No. 2 on this week’s Hot 100, and very much still a threat to jump back up to No. 1 any time the competition sags for a week or two. However, its chances of matching or even nearing the 16 weeks (!!) “Last Night” spent atop the Hot 100 last year are growing slim — and while it remains the clear Song of the Summer frontrunner, it also remains vulnerable in the race if any of the songs beneath it experience another power surge.
Shaboozey, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” (American Dogwood/EMPIRE/Magnolia Music): Though it initially seemed like it would be scrapping with Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” on the undercard for this summer’s title fight, Shaboozey‘s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has elbowed its way into the main event. With consistently impressive streaming numbers and downright stunning sales since its April release, radio was the final piece of the puzzle for “A Bar Song” — and it has delivered on that front, attracting airplay from a historic array of radio formats, and climbing all the way to No. 2 on Radio Songs so far, behind “Help.” Like that song, “Bar Song” ranks in the top five on each of the Hot 100’s three component charts this week — and actually tops “Help” with its No. 2 placement on both Streaming Songs and Digital Song Sales.
More crucially, “Bar Song” also tops “Help” on the Hot 100 this week — its second frame atop the chart. That’s still four behind Post and Morgan, of course, so “Bar Song” has plenty of catching up to do if it wants to really challenge “Help.” But it helps that “Bar Song” has also been in the fight since the very beginning of this SotS season — debuting at No. 4 on Songs of the Summer and working its way up to No. 2 by the end of June — so if it continues growing on radio as it has so far and “Help” starts to recede a little, or if it gets a momentum-boosting remix or new video, there’s certainly a chance that “Bar Song” could steal this race yet.
Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us” (pgLang/Interscope/ICLG): Pre-”I Had Some Help,” it looked like “Not Like Us” was going to be the song to beat this summer. It debuted atop the (already very crowded) Hot 100 with an incomplete first week of tracking, thanks to otherworldly levels of excitement around it as the knockout punch in the increasingly fevered back-and-forth between Kendrick Lamar and rival-to-the-north Drake. “I Had Some Help” quite impressively managed to lap it the very next week, and as interest in the beef died down (and radio understandably was slower to pick up the virulent missive than the cartoonishly crossover-friendly “Help”), it seemed like “Not Like Us” would bow out of the Song of the Summer race before it even really began.
But as the hip-hop and pop worlds should’ve learned from his bout with Drake in the first place, you can never count out Kung Fu Kenny. Lamar’s new signature smash was doubly adrenalized by his much-publicized, nationally-streamed Juneteenth concert spectacular The Pop Out, and then by the song’s official music video, which dropped on July 4. Following the boost from the latter, “Not Like Us” even reclaimed the Hot 100’s top spot for the first time in two months. It’s back down to No. 3 on this week’s listing, and may have finally run out of extra lives, but we’re twice bitten, three times shy there — especially since it’s up 6% in airplay this week, according to Luminate, and at No. 9 on Radio Songs, and we still haven’t gotten any kind of official remix for the song.
Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso” & “Please Please Please” (Island/Republic): If you could somehow merge the popularity and momentum from Sabrina Carpenter’s two summer singles so far, you’d undoubtedly have yourself the song of the season: “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” both reached the Hot 100’s top five (the latter marking her first leader), and have been fixtures of the Songs of the Summer’s top 10, with Carpenter the only artist with multiple entries in the 20-position seasonal chart’s top half this week. With Carpenter’s new album due the week after Post Malone’s in August, her two four-quadrant smashes will undoubtedly receive a sizeable bump. But if she wants to challenge for the SotS No. 1 spot with either song, she won’t be able to wait around for that — neither is higher than No. 5 on the chart this week, and Billboard’s summer season officially ends following the chart dated Sept. 7.
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