The Algorithm Darlings - Unwrapping Who Won Pop Music in 2024

Words: Tsari Paxton

Make it stand out

Once a viral moment that set the internet alight, Spotify Wrapped seems to become less and less exciting every year, mostly because of the increasing sameness across what people I follow are listening to. I have never felt more siloed into my echo chamber than last year when Spotify told me my listening tastes were most similar to people who live in the London borough of Islington – I’m based in Hackney, just a few miles away.

Nevertheless, it’s been an interesting year in pop music – one in which many of the year’s anticipated albums didn’t really slap. Dua Lipa’s repetitive, mid-tempo disco record was a snoozefest. Katy Perry’s cringe-filled comeback bombed. SZA kept us waiting another year for Lana. Even the incessant drone of Taylor Swift fandom suffered through a mediocre album. And a pair of languid releases from pop heavyweights – Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter and Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine – were critical hits, but never quite caught fire.

It was a trio of upstarts who leapfrogged above the rest to achieve zeitgeist-level pop prominence in 2024. Even before the onslaught of Spotify Wrapped results were shared by my international feed of girls and gays, it was easy to predict that Charli XCX, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter would feature prominently.

Writing songs for some of pop’s biggest names and networking her ass off for the past decade, Charli XCX had bided her time waiting in the wings of stardom. In 2024, her chartreuse-hued brand of club-pop nihilism really hit the spot, and her small-but-enthusiastic fan base grew into a global movement. Brat dominated the internet’s attention with such intensity that everyone from Greenpeace to the Kamala Harris election campaign tried to cash in on its momentum. A tightly layered dissection of her hopes, anxieties and female friendships, it was remarkable to see a Charli album become mainstream culture.

As a quirky lesbian singer-songwriter from the American midwest, nobody saw Chappell Roan coming. It is Chappel’s brilliant debut album and her spellbinding, drag-inspired artistry that catapulted her from ‘niche’ artist to stardom this year – blossoming into a fully formed popstar with red carpet-to-stage costume concepts like her Joan of Arc moment at the VMAs. Internet chatter even accused her of being an industry plant for her seismic rise to notoriety and Spotify’s incessant promotion of her music

At some point in early summer, Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso emerged like a breath of fresh air, and it then began hunting us all down harder than a Temu advert you accidentally clicked on once. Spotify launched an aggressive assault on our ears by placing the song  - as well as Sabrina’s subsequent singles - second on almost every artist’s radio playlists, regardless of genre. Whether you believe the conspiracy theories that suggest her success is thanks to a bribe from her record label, or think it was just the luck of the algorithm, she started the year only really famous for being the subject of the love triangle in Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License, and ends it as a superstar.

“This might seem innocuous enough when we’re talking about pop music, but potentially terrifying when you consider that so much of our lives – political, social, romantic – is shaped by the same opaque forces.”

Media analyst Kyle Chayka has written about ‘filterworld’ – the term he uses to refer to the vast, interlocking and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today. Chayka discusses that algorithmic recommendations favour a certain kind of culture: things that are simple, and made for sharing, over and over. Everything about Sabrina Carpenter is shareable – her music goes down easy; she’s a pretty white girl with a sugary pop princess persona and a self-aware, sharp mind - on display through constantly changing the lyrics at the end of songs in live shows, a tradition that blew up on TikTok.

While I genuinely love that we have these three new queens of pop to adore and worship, I have to admit that I don’t really remember when I started stanning Charli, Chappel and Sabrina. In fact, I question whether I was an active participant in it? Social media algorithms told us what to listen to and my personal echo chamber lapped it up. This might seem innocuous enough when we’re talking about pop music, but potentially terrifying when you consider that so much of our lives – political, social, romantic – is shaped by the same opaque forces.

Power shifting away from the establishment, niche points of view becoming mass culture, and the aggressive power of the algorithm – do any of these topics sound eerily familiar? These unlikely success stories echo some of the forces that lead to Donald Trump’s return to the White House in November’s US election. Let’s not forget that the MAGA movement was a fringe point of view that’s grown into mainstream culture and rather than trying to widen his base of voter support in the last few months of the election campaign, Trump doubled-down on sexist, racist and outlandish rhetoric. In this method, Trump’s team took a big gamble on the power of social media’s algorithms by going deep rather than wide – betting that more extreme points of view would cut through the online noise and mobilise a greater number of the same kind of voters.

Elon Musk’s jubilant post-Election day post on X declaring “You are the media now” attempted to celebrate the downfall of traditional structures of meaning, moving away from newsrooms and political experts. Yet the idea that power has been handed back to the people is laughable, especially coming from Musk, considering that he is one of a very small handful of tech CEOs who hold a monopoly of unregulated power that can – and already has – been used to tweak what and how content is shared.

Since the shockingly one-sided election outcome, people have interpreted the result as a rejection of the Democratic Party, but maybe it’s not that deep? Rather than a rejection of something, maybe Trump dominated simply because he used blunt, sharable soundbites to ride the algorithm and win the most competitive contest of all – the battle over our collective attention. Likewise, this trio of pop queens won our attention in 2024 because they found themselves as the benefactors of self-regurgitating algorithms
Perhaps the true winner of pop music in 2024 was Spotify’s algorithm, as it showed just how powerfully it can dictate culture. Very few platforms across any category have as much market share as Spotify (62% of UK audio streaming takes place on there) – and I genuinely wonder if the team at Spotify HQ used Sabrina Carpenter to test whether they could turn a middling artist into a megastar through sheer force of repetition.