The difference between a viral song and a breakout artist

Most first hits don’t turn into careers. That isn’t a TikTok problem. It’s the base rate.

In 2023, Billboard’s Elias Leight looked at every act that reached the top 40 of the Hot 100. From 2002 to 2019, an average of 54% of them “failed to return with at least a second entry.” In 2020, it was 70%. And only around 10% of acts who reached the top 40 once between 2002 and 2020 went on to appear there at least ten times, which Billboard used as a rough line for a “career artist.”

So before anyone explains why a viral song didn’t become a career, I think it’s worth remembering that most songs that get that far never do. The ones that do are the exception that needs explaining. I wrote about why a hit and a career come apart as an argument. This post is the evidence.

What does a viral song actually prove?

It proves a song, or fifteen seconds of it, traveled. That’s real. But it doesn’t prove that the people who heard it know who sang it, or that they’ll come back for the next one.

The best public evidence I’ve found on this is a Harvard Business School working paper about the stretch in 2024 when Universal Music Group pulled its music off TikTok, from February to May. The researchers compared UMG tracks with Sony and Warner tracks on Spotify and YouTube. Overall, they found removing UMG’s music “did not significantly alter the overall demand” for those tracks.

The detail is more interesting than the headline. UMG tracks that had been on TikTok saw a 2 to 3% increase in streams once they were gone, mostly “more popular tracks from well-known artists.” The authors read that as TikTok use standing in for listening elsewhere. UMG tracks that hadn’t been on TikTok saw a 1 to 3% decrease, mostly “less popular tracks from lesser-known artists.” They read that as TikTok helping people find artists.

My read: for a song that’s already huge, the clip might be the whole experience. For a smaller artist, the clip can be a door. Same app, opposite effects, depending on who you are. I’d hold that loosely, though. It’s a working paper, it covers one dispute over a few months, and the effects are small.

Three public cases

Lil Nas X. “Old Town Road” rode TikTok to 19 weeks at No. 1 in 2019, which Billboard called Hot 100 history. Plenty of people assumed that was the whole story. Then “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” debuted at No. 1 in 2021, and “Industry Baby” with Jack Harlow peaked at No. 2. Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz said the second No. 1 put “any lingering one-hit wonder claims to bed.” He credited the videos, the TV performances, a running social media act, deliberate provocation, and a second hit that “sounded nothing like the previous one.”

That’s a list of things around the song, not the song itself. But I’d be careful with it. Those are the things he did, and he kept having hits. That doesn’t prove they caused it. Lots of artists make expensive videos.

Gotye. “Somebody That I Used To Know” went 14 times platinum in the US, according to Double J. Wally De Backer told them that American radio promoters were “so chuffed, patting me on the back saying, ‘Man, we’ve never seen a song jump radio formats like this!’” He said he “had to go digging into ‘What are the radio formats in America?’”

Then he stepped away. In a 2014 newsletter he said there would be no new Gotye music, while leaving the door open for later. He kept playing with his band The Basics, co-founded a label, and spent years restoring and performing Jean-Jacques Perrey’s Ondioline recordings. “I’m not interested in selling my music,” he’s quoted saying in The Music.

I wouldn’t call that a failed breakout. He didn’t want the job. Which is worth saying out loud, because “durable career” is partly the artist’s definition, not just the industry’s.

Zach Bryan. Billboard’s biography says he released music independently while he was enlisted in the Navy. His first Billboard 200 entry was American Heartbreak in 2022, which peaked at No. 5. In 2023 his self-titled album debuted at No. 1 with 200,000 units, and “I Remember Everything” with Kacey Musgraves debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100 at the same time. With Heaven On Top topped the Billboard 200 in 2026.

By the time the charts caught up with him, he’d been putting out songs on his own for a while. When people showed up, there was a catalog to fall into.

Is there research on why some last?

Some. Justin Berg at Stanford built a dataset of more than 3 million songs by nearly 70,000 artists released between 1959 and 2010. He found that artists whose catalogs were more novel or more varied at the time of their first hit were more likely to keep having hits.

The catch is the part I find most honest. A more unusual catalog also made a first hit less likely. As Berg puts it, an artist can’t raise their odds of becoming a lasting hitmaker without also raising their odds of “having zero hits in their careers.”

That data ends in 2010, well before short video. It measures sound, not marketing or money. And it’s observational. But it lines up with something the Zach Bryan story suggests. What exists before the moment might matter as much as the moment.

Spotify adds a different angle. It says more than 80% of artists who generated $1 million or more on Spotify in 2025 “did not have a Top-50 hit.” Spotify has its own reasons to say that. Still, it’s a reminder that a lot of real careers never had a viral song to begin with.

Correlation, causation, and the stories we don’t hear

Every case above has things tangled together that can’t be pulled apart from the outside: the songs, the timing, the team, the money, and the person. We tell the Lil Nas X story because it worked. We don’t hear much about the artists who did the same things and didn’t get a second hit.

So I’m not going to turn this into a checklist. If I were looking at an artist right after a viral moment, I’d want to know a few things instead:

• Are people searching for the name, or just using the sound?
• Is there anything for a new listener to go to after the clip?
• Does the next release get a hearing without the trend behind it?
• Does the artist actually want what a long career asks of them?

If you’re an independent artist working on the second question, I put the free tools I’d start with in a guide for independent artists.

None of those answers shows up in the view count. It’s the same reason more content isn’t a strategy on its own.

Billboard’s 2023 piece quoted an anonymous manager who said “more people are investing in songs that might not have the artist proposition attached to them.” If that 70% figure from 2020 holds up over more years, the industry might be getting more hits and fewer careers out of them. Whether that’s short video, or labels signing songs instead of artists, or something else, I don’t know. I go further into how AI and data are changing A&R and marketing in the longer guide. I don’t think anyone has shown it yet.