I may not be the only one who has been freaking out for a while now when opening Spotify’s global charts and finding a bunch of very old songs coexisting with newer ones. ‘Beauty and the Beat’, ‘The One That Got Away’, ‘Creep’, ‘Lush Life’, ‘Iris’, the dreadful ‘Treat You Better’… Many songs with more than a decade behind them are being listened to daily with an intensity comparable to the current hits by Sabrina Carpenter, BTS, Bruno Mars, or Olivia Rodrigo. Right now, more than twenty songs in Spotify’s Global Top 50 are old hits. I’m not saying this has never happened before. I’m saying that now it’s much more pronounced.
For some time now, a hit no longer has to be a new song. I mean, of course, to the Spotify Global lists, which are a particularly useful thermometer for observing what people listen to day in and day out, even though they are not a complete snapshot of global music consumption. It’s not a trivial fact: streaming now generates almost 70% of the world’s recorded-music revenue.
Today a Justin Bieber song from 2012 can return to the number one spot on Spotify in 2026 and no one is surprised. Usually there’s a trigger: a performance, a viral moment, a series, TikTok or any other small miracle capable of bringing a song back into the present. But often it’s not just a spike in popularity. Old songs resurface and manage to stay for months, sometimes with a presence that seems even bigger than what they had at the time.
Streaming and our new listening habits have changed our relationship with music. The songs we listen to no longer have to be new. Before, novelty came mainly through radio; later through the CD and the purchase of records. Radio imposed a present because there had to be a decision about what sounded and what stopped. Streaming, by contrast, puts almost the entire archive at our disposal at once. ‘Creep’, from 1992, and a song released in 2026 are, literally, one click away.
Luminate’s data have long pointed in this direction: in the United States, more than 75% of audio streams in 2025 were catalog music, that is, songs over 18 months old. It’s not that we’ve stopped listening to new music, but that now new releases compete for our attention with a whole slew of old hits that keep resurrecting themselves.
Spotify, naturally, does have playlists specialized by decades, genres, or eras. But those lists are curated spaces and do not necessarily reflect what people are listening to on a daily basis. Global playlists, by contrast, put in the same space the songs people are listening to right now. ‘Iris’ can compete with the latest single from an emerging star; ‘Every Breath You Take’, with a release this week from Charli XCX. And both things count as exactly one listen.
Seen like this, the outlook for new music is quite bleak. New songs do win, yes, but they do so in an arena increasingly crowded with old hits. We may come across recent anthems from Carly Rae Jepsen, Jungle, or Dagny that don’t receive the attention they deserve while thousands of people keep listening to ‘One Dance’ as if it were day one. Of course, ‘Birds of a Feather’ was a new song two years ago and ‘Choosin’ Texas’ is only a few months old. The problem isn’t that new songs can’t succeed, but that they seem to need ever more time to settle into the collective imagination.
All this leads one to think about what comes after streaming, or whether streaming will be the final form of musical consumption. There may be no “after.” The real change this technology has brought isn’t the next format, but the end of the need to separate music into new and old. If everything is available at the same time, a 1992 song can become a hit again in 2026. And when that happens, we are no longer listening to the past, but to the present.
