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The Most Popular Song You’ve Never Heard
How “Choosin’ Texas” broke Billboard records without breaking through on streaming.
This essay was originally published in Stat Significant, a weekly newsletter featuring data-centric essays about movies, music, and TV.
Intro: The Most Popular Song in Human History
Let’s imagine the year is 3026 and the human race is long gone, having perished in [insert some horrible tragedy that Al Gore predicted]. A group of extraterrestrial beings arrives on our planet, curious to study our culture and use archival information to piece together how we lived.
In an effort to understand our art, they stumble upon extensive record-keeping from the Billboard Hot 100. These aliens crunch the numbers and subsequently deduce that the greatest tune in human history was none other than Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” which, as of this writing, has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 24 weeks, an all-time record, surpassing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
