Music success is not the same as it was — but at least we have Harry Styles

Courtesy of his stealthily good hit As It Was, British pop star Harry Styles is a record-breaker. In the process of racking up 15 weeks at the top of the US’s Billboard Hot 100, the fourth-highest total for any track and the most for any by a UK artist, As It Was is the only song ever to have had five separate stints as US number one.

At the time of writing, As It Was is number two. Even if its non-consecutive reign is over, the song’s repeated boomeranging back to number one makes it both an outlier and a one-track reflection of the state of the music industry. This is a business in which hits are staying hits, propped up in the higher echelons of the charts by streaming users either reluctant to move on to the next big thing or not persuaded to do so at the rate they once were.

Much of the durability of As It Was is down to Styles. In the public eye since One Direction’s teenage run on The X Factor in 2010, he has grown into a modestly magnetic figure with a Bowie-channelling flair for costume, an acting side-career you might have heard about, a personal life that generously sustains publications and a Gen-Z fanbase that won’t tolerate a word said against him.

Throughout all this, he seems to have retained a sense of humour and, that even rarer quality among handsome young pop stars, perspective.

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Today, songs go straight to number one thanks to careful social media hype, playlist positioning and the nature of how music is consumed

A second reason for the song’s endurance is, well, the song itself. Written by Styles with producers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, it begins with a cute voice-note from his goddaughter before self-admonishing lyrics, set to a melancholic melody, kick in. Propelled by a driving drumbeat and various synths-y sections before the late introduction of descending bells — making it Christmas-appropriate — As It Was has less bombast than other Styles singles, never straying too far from its vibe. It is the definition of radio-friendly in an era when radio is not meant to be as important.

Cleverly, it offers something to Styles-obsessives intrigued by his relationship with director Olivia Wilde, while also tapping into a relatable post-pandemic mood slump with its “you know it’s not the same as it was” refrain, hooking nostalgists and disappointed people of all ages. To many ears, it will sound like an innocuous snippet. To mine, it represents my favourite juxtaposition in music: downbeat sentiments expressed in a resolutely up-tempo sub-three minutes.

Released by Sony Music Entertainment’s Columbia Records and his own label Erskine, As It Was belongs to that elite group of songs that are both grower and instant triumph. After its release on April 1st as the lead single off his third solo album Harry’s House, it racked up 16 million global Spotify streams in a 24-hour period — a metric beaten only by Adele’s Easy on Me and the 2021 and 2020 Christmas Eve streams of Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You.

The song entered the charts at number one in Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria, holding the top spot for 10 weeks in the UK, where it is currently the biggest “selling” single of 2022, topping streams, downloads and physical sales.

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Back when the singles chart was determined solely by physical sales, debuts at number one were engineered through a combination of advance radio airplay and, in the UK, discounted pricing in the week of release.

Today, songs go straight to number one thanks to careful social media hype, playlist positioning and the nature of how music is consumed. Free streaming, from ad-supported Spotify to YouTube, is available to anyone with a smartphone, eliminating delays to access.

Music buyers continued to play the songs they bought, of course, and this listenership via owned collections wasn’t captured in the official charts. While the Billboard Hot 100 always counted radio airplay, the UK’s main chart, compiled by the Official Charts Company, was based only on purchases until 2014, when it started to count streams under a complex formula (two years after Billboard did the same). Accusations that the UK chart was stagnating, with fewer new entries and the same old songs hanging round for months, soon followed.

Even when Bryan Adams was amassing his record consecutive 16 weeks at number one in 1991, there was a swirl of climbers, fallers and “breakers” happening beneath his chart-topper that seems frantic by today’s standards. The annual recharting of festive staples perhaps best illustrates the challenges facing new artists and new tracks. But there is evidence of a stranglehold at other times too.

Styles may be a keeper purely because he is Styles: charming and enigmatic, in classic idol fashion

In the list of the UK’s “biggest songs” of 2022 to date, As It Was has the distinction of being released this year. The second, third and fifth biggest, all Ed Sheeran tracks, are products of 2021, while the fourth-placed Go by Cat Burns first emerged in 2020 before its recent adoption by TikTok users. The sixth-biggest? That would be Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (1985).

Other notable clingers in the year-to-date top 40 include Glass Animals’ Heat Waves (2020), Elton John and Dua Lipa’s Cold Heart (2021) and The Killers’ bizarrely unkillable Mr Brightside (2003).

If this was just a matter of chart methodology, it wouldn’t matter. But for anyone who remembers the faster turnover of yesteryear, there is a sluggishness to the entire cycle of the music industry now that threatens to unravel the ephemeral joy of it. What was once a conveyor belt of new hits is stuttering along at half speed.

The strangest aspect to this slowing down of pop culture is that no success is too un-fleeting for it to be missed. By accident or design, the words “come on, Harry, we want to say goodnight to you” will not be recognisable to a vast swathe. The fragmented media landscape makes it ridiculously easy to live a life unburdened by conscious familiarity with music’s A-list. It’s almost as if the act of purchasing a song (or an album) didn’t just have more financial value than streaming it, it had more cultural weight too.

Styles may be a keeper purely because he is Styles: charming and enigmatic, in classic idol fashion. And yet the industry around him has sunk into a groove that renders fresh, unignorable sounds elusive even to those executives whose job it is to deliver them. So, no, it’s not the same as it was. Something along the way has been lost.