Ella Langley Can’t Believe Her Success. Many Listeners Can’t Either.
The criteria—and meaning—of a No. 1 hit are always changing.
Last week, after Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” ended its 23rd week as the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, she took to Instagram to express gratitude. The singer had just set a record for the longest-running No. 1 song in Hot 100 history, a milestone that didn’t feel real, she said. “‘Choosin’ T.’ Wow,” she added, with a flash of teeth and a shake of her head. “That’s the one, huh?”
Elsewhere online, others registered their own disbelief over the song’s apparent popularity. Like thousands of would-be Pauline Kaels claiming to not know a single Nixon voter, many professed never to have heard the diffident ballad that dethroned Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the previous record holder. (Or perhaps they had, and then forgotten it: “I think I enjoy Langley’s pale and pleasant songs,” my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote in July, “but I can barely remember how they sound when I’m not listening.”) Some detected unreconstructed snobbery in the chatter: A Rolling Stone critic argued that claiming never to have heard of “Choosin’ Texas” is the “‘I listen to anything but country’ of 2026”—a commonly heard declaration of taste that casually reveals the speaker’s prejudices. But the bewilderment also speaks to a different cultural gap: the difficulty of comparing the popularity of today’s chart-toppers with those of the past.
Billboard maintains, with somewhat circular logic, that its benchmark remains the same as it ever was: “The Hot 100 has always reflected the biggest song in the U.S. each week since its start in August 1958,” Gary Trust, the publication’s managing director of charts and data operations, told The Fader last year. “In that sense, a No. 1 today by Alex Warren is no different from a No. 1 by Elvis or the Beatles in the 1960s.” But the Hot 100 formula has adapted, over the decades, to keep up with the technological advances that have transformed how people buy, share, and enjoy music. What it means for a song to be “big” has never held steady.
Though today’s charts still incorporate radio play and music sales, streaming has fundamentally altered their composition—and the success of “Choosin’ Texas” has been propelled by the listening habits encouraged by those platforms. Many users tune in passively, carried along by programmed or algorithmic lists; this ecosystem is primed for an easygoing tune such as Langley’s, which can fit into many different niches. On Spotify, for example, it leaped from the platform’s “Hot Country” chart to “Today’s Top Hits,” and was also dispersed into the cultural atmosphere through subtler, more diffuse, pathways: The song often popped up in “Mood” and “Moments” playlists, Claire Heinichen, a senior editor at Spotify, told the Associated Press, “because it fits so well in ‘driving’ or ‘chill’ or ‘cookout.’” As of mid-August, the song has been streamed on the platform more than 1 billion times.
Langley’s success was also powered by the country audience’s growth on streaming platforms in recent years. When streaming gained traction as a primary listening option in the early 2010s, the genre’s artists and fans were slower to take to the technology, Charlie Dahan, the director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, told me. But in the years since the pandemic, they have made country one of the fastest-growing genres on streaming platforms, where country fans have outsize influence on which songs become hits. Compared with general audiences, country fans are extra loyal to the artists they love, playing songs on repeat, Jaime Marconette, the vice president of music insights and industry relations at the entertainment-analytics company Luminate, told me.
The country audience also tends to use premium streaming services—a preference that gives them more sway over the charts, since Billboard gives more weight to streams from subscription platforms, compared with streams from ad-supported services. (In January, due to a dispute over this weighting ratio, YouTube, which has been one of the most popular music platforms in the United States, stopped sending data to Billboard altogether.) As a result, though country music has a relatively small footprint on streaming platforms, accounting for just less than 9 percent of audio streams in the U.S. in the first half of 2026, “it definitely, definitely outpunches its weight” on the Hot 100, Marconette said. In 2017, country songs accounted for just 6 percent of Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 list; in 2025, they accounted for nearly a third.
This trove of data showing how listeners interact with individual songs is a relatively recent development: For much of their history, the Billboard charts had only a partial view of music consumption. After a record got rung up at the register, the music industry had little insight into whether it got played to death or gathered dust. When the magazine started incorporating data from modern streaming platforms, in the early 2010s, this marked a paradigmatic shift: The charts’ traditional focus on purchasing got overtaken by a new focus on listening. In the chart-making context, streaming is a “very weird behavior,” Larry Wayte, a musicology professor at the University of Oregon, told me. Playing a song on a streaming service is frictionless for the consumer. “How does a click equate to finding a record store, and finding the record in the record store, and putting down 10 bucks?”
Billboard’s strategies for tracking audience tastes—and, more concretely, a song’s power to generate revenue—have changed dramatically over time, making it hard to draw clean comparisons between hits from different decades. In the 1930s, the publication attempted to track the popularity of individual songs by factoring in requests received by bandleaders in nightclubs, ballrooms, and hotels, as well as sales of sheet music. What counted as a “hit” back then was fueled not only by record purchases but also by what music was being performed at live venues or bought in the form of printed text, to be played at home on the piano or guitar. In the 1940s, Billboard tracked jukebox plays, a metric that, in providing an objective tally of what songs people selected, could be considered a distant, more communal ancestor to today’s stream counts. And during the Hot 100’s modern era, which started around 1958, Billboard has changed its criteria many times over. In 1998, it relaxed its rule that only retail singles (a bygone format in which a song was sold individually as a physical product) were eligible for the charts; in the early 2000s, the launch of the iTunes store and its competitors enabled the incorporation of digital song sales.
In the streaming age, the biggest songs aren’t easily dislodged from the charts: Langley’s accomplishment has followed a string of impressive runs from singles by Shaboozey (“A Bar Song (Tipsy),” 19 weeks at No. 1), Lil Nas X (“Old Town Road,” 19 weeks) and Morgan Wallen (“Last Night,” 16 weeks). “Choosin’ Texas” has just spent a 24th week at No.1, extending its record. But Chris Dalla Riva, the author of Uncharted Territory, a book on pop-music history, cautioned me against concluding that today’s listeners are significantly more loyal to popular songs than in the past. In 1991, Billboard stopped relying on phone surveys with retailers to estimate record sales, and started using SoundScan, a data system that electronically tracked purchases. “Overnight, the charts changed,” he said of that period. Hip-hop became much more prevalent on the charts, and the Hot 100 started exhibiting patterns similar to today: The No. 1 songs sat at the top for longer stretches, while those lower down the list churned rapidly.
Such chart trends have less to do with any inherent property of music and its production, and more to do with Billboard methodology, Dalla Riva argued. Another data point to support his theory: Christmas songs now re-chart each December, but didn’t in past decades, when Billboard had no means of confirming that people were replaying their already purchased copies of their favorite holiday tracks.
Compared with the jukebox era, or even the boombox era, music consumption today is much more transparent, in that it comes with a much richer data trail. At the same time, that consumption feels much more atomized and closed-off: Popularity is assessed via the private choices of millions of individual listeners, not by observing a shared cultural experience. “This is one of those things you can’t exactly measure—like, is ‘Choosin’ Texas’ as culturally pervasive as the Macarena was?” Dalla Riva said. “I don’t think so. I mean, they were doing the Macarena at the 1996 Democratic National Convention.” Whatever the data say, it is hard to feel that all of America has really chosen “Choosin’ Texas.” Such is the paradox of making Billboard history in 2026: Even when the chart clearly shows that a song has taken over, it has never been easier for a listener to escape from a No. 1 hit.
