Why "Choosin' Texas" doesn't feel like a hit

Last week, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” broke the record for the most weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The record was previously held by Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” which is a song I’ve definitely heard before and could reliably hum the melody of. “Choosin’ Texas,” not so much.

In fact, I went over to the Wikipedia page listing all the other songs that held the record and I can safely say I’ve heard most of them. Megaton hits like “Old Town Road,” “Despacito,” and “Macarena.” Incidentally the only song on the list I’ve never heard before was Morgan Wallen’s 2023 song “Last Night.” Which might actually be an important data point, but we’ll swing back around to that in a minute.

I am not the only person who is a little foggy on “Choosin’ Texas.” Social media abounds with users claiming to have never heard the song before. Back in July, CNN had to publish an explainer, calling the song, “The country pop sensation you might not have heard of.” CNN’s hypothesis is that “hyper-personalized” algorithms ended the age of the hit song. Which I’ll admit is an explanation I find compelling, but the actual numbers we have for tracking this sort of thing paint a slightly more complicated picture.

There are 14 other songs that have held the record “Choosin’ Texas” just broke. Nine of them were released in the 21st century and six of those were released in the last decade. Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is the complicated one. The song came out in 1994, but didn’t start breaking records until 2019, when, thanks to a massive push from the internet, it turned into the perennial hit that now basically re-breaks the record every Christmas. Which, like Wallen’s “Last Night” might be another important piece of the puzzle here. But let’s put a pin in that for now, as well.

What we can say is that there are more record-breaking hits than ever happening faster than ever. And, unless CNN was trying to argue that the monoculture died at some point in the last 18 months, many of these are truly massive songs. The song that held the record before “Choosin’ Texas,” if you remove the yearly bump from “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” was Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” Which I think we’ve all heard before. But I’ve never seen another real human being listening to “Choosin’ Texas.” Though maybe it’s because I simply don’t live in a part of the country where that would happen. A common complaint you tend to hear when a country song starts climbing the charts.

Rolling Stone’s Marissa R. Moss, who has been diligently covering Langley and the Nashville music scene all year, argued this exact point over the weekend. She acknowledged our supposedly dead monoculture, but believes the complaints that huge swathes of the country have never heard “Choosin’ Texas” before are actually “shorthand, often, for liberal politics and a way to separate oneself from anything that could be associated with rural or Southern stereotypes.”

I’m old enough to remember this same argument being trotted out during the Bush administration and as a life-long northerner snob it always gives me a perverse little thrill because it makes no sense. Somehow country music is both the soundtrack of the real America and, also, a precious wittle underdog that needs to be handled delicately because the elitists in the big cities won’t support it. This was idiotic when Toby Keith was threatening to stick a boot up the ass of Al-Qaeda and it’s even dumber now that Nashville has successfully transmogrified itself into Las Vegas south. Also, to accept any of this means you’d have to say that Shaboozey, who did not get the same flack that Langley has, is not a country artist. If he is somehow different from Langley, well, I’d love to hear why!

The last piece of the Ella Langley Problem, though, is the question of what people even mean when they say that they’ve never heard it before. I’ve seen snippets of it in short-form videos on my feed, but I can say that I’ve never encountered it beyond the confines of my screen. I have yet to hear it in a store, in a restaurant, or in a cab. But none of those public spaces play normal radio stations anymore. Which brings us back to the algorithm. If we’re all deep inside our own digital world of Spotify playlists and TikTok challenges — even in public — maybe we just can’t feel the big hits like we used to? But surely that would mean that we’re actually seeing fewer hits than before. Wouldn’t it be harder to build some kind of mass consensus? Well, let’s actually look at what’s been happening on Spotify.

Garbage Day’s researcher Adam Bumas tracks Spotify numbers month-to-month, so we have a pretty good sense of Langley’s trajectory. “Choosin’ Texas,” which was released in October 2025, made its first big jump on Spotify right after New Year’s Eve this year, moving from #51 on the Spotify US charts to #6. It wasn’t just that Langley needed Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” to clear out first, but the entire Christmas takeover of Spotify. Of the top 50 songs on Spotify last December, only three of them were not Christmas songs. And all of those normal pop hits were in the lower 40s. Once we hit the first of the year, whoever had a song in the top 100 suddenly moved up to the top 25.

I also found stray references to Langley getting a big country radio push around the same time. Which I view as solid evidence that the country music industrial complex has learned that January is an exploitable gap in the streaming charts for this exact reason. Oh, look at that, Wallen’s “Last Night” was released at the end of January 2023, peaked on the country charts a month later, and then hit the Billboard Hot 100 in March and basically had the same life cycle as “Choosin’ Texas,” albeit shorter. The machine has only become more efficient at creating Ella Langley’s it seems.

Perhaps most crucially, though, Langley’s sudden rise last January also lines up perfectly with Trumpist oligarch Larry Ellison’s purchase of TikTok. This is around the same time the song started to trend on TikTok for the first time. We’ve never found explicit right-wing censorship or meddling on the platform post-acquisition, but we did immediately notice a flood of garbage sticking around at longer at the top of the app than it ever did during the ByteDance years. The first big trend to feature “Choosin’ Texas” were videos about mishearing the lyrics when the song played on the radio. This seems to have helped Langley considerably.

Now I want to be clear, I don’t think “Choosin’ Texas” was astroturfed into existence. If you’ve heard it and you like it, that’s fine. No one tricked you. But the song’s rise required a very specific set of circumstances to get as big as it has and it relies on a profoundly broken media environment to stay as popular as it is. What music writer Holiday Kirk recently dubbed, “the imperial regime” of pop music. And this imperial regime is sustained by two large forces.

One of these forces is the algorithm, the sleepy bits of code that mindlessly promote a song on a given platform once it clears enough A/B testing. This never-ending slot machine of attention affects everything we see online now, but it’s been especially transformative to the world of music. Long gone are the days of Gotye, OK Go, Macklemore, or even Lil Nas X, where a song might travel from a bedroom to stadiums around the world in a matter of months thanks to some injection of novelty into the network. The only way to do that now is by attacking the network with a network of your own. An apparatus large enough and wealthy enough to flood the zone. Or, in this instance, a city in Tennessee full of musicians and record executives that has a radio industry still.

The other large force at play here are the calcified cultural institutions of the 20th century that are still powerful enough to kinda-sorta work as they always have. But they’re also decrepit enough for big artists, big labels, or just random billionaires to manipulate them. This could be Sony Nashville deploying a big radio campaign right in the pocket of Spotify’s January doldrums. Or this could be last night’s dismal VMAs.

The vibes were rancid — excluding Yung Lean and GENER8ION. One user on X wrote, “getting the feeling this might be the last VMAs :(“ The whole miserable affair was capped off with Taylor Swift winning the first ever “Artist Director Honor,” an award she won for directing her own music video, which was, according to Entertainment Weekly, “created due to outside influences.” You can read between the lines there. Swift has won Video of the Year at the VMAs five times in the last eight years. And here again we see an Ellison connection. The VMAs aired on CBS this year. We’ll see if it ever airs again.

The consensus has been that algorithmic filter bubbles have locked us off from each other, which is why the highest echelons of pop music feel so stale. But what’s actually happened is that Silicon Valley created a new, worse version of popularity that everyone just accepted at face value at some point between 2019-2023. And while everyone was moving over to social platforms to chase this new worthless form of popularity, the levers that used to run the world became the personal sandboxes of the ultra-wealthy. A hit like “Choosin’ Texas” is not just a case of Spotify playlists inventing a pop song out of thin air. The record labels, radio stations, and TV channels of the old world devolved into fiefdoms of the already established and already famous, and, of course, their friends and children. “Choosin’ Texas” was co-written by Miranda Lambert, who been working with Langley for years.

This transformation both online and off is not so different from all those MAGA rappers bragging about scoring number one spots on iTunes. Of course they can climb to the top of iTunes, no one gives a shit about the platform. Langley dominating streaming (and radio) for months or Swift winning a VMA every year works the same way. Which is the punchline to all of this.

Looking at that Wikipedia list again. There are more “hits” more often than ever. And these songs are getting stuck at the top of the charts longer than they used to. The hot new song is now the perpetual hot new song and there are all kinds of systems in place to make sure it stays that way. When Elton John’s “Candle In The Wind” broke the most weeks at number one record in 1997, it stayed there for 14 weeks. When Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” did it in 2018, it was 19 weeks. “Choosin’ Texas” is nearing six months at the top. But at a certain point, that level of domination doesn’t look like a good thing anymore. It means you aren’t competing against anyone else. It means the entire system might be broken. And, as we all might discovering this year, people eventually just stop caring all together. Enjoy your number one, though, I guess.

Adam Bumas contributed reporting to this piece.

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