Do Contenders for 'Song of the Summer' Strike a Chord with You?
By Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Last year, you couldn't escape 'Fancy' and the question of the season was 'Why you gotta be so rude?' The Iggy Azalea and Magic! tunes were on just about everybody's beach and party playlists.
So, what will be the song of the summer this time around?
Iggy's back, rapping 'Pretty Girls' with Britney Spears in tow.
A triple-threat collaboration, 'Where are Ü Now,' features Justin Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo.
"You're looking for a song that will stand out," explains Sean Ross, the vice president of programming at Edison Research and summer song soothsayer. "There are a lot of songs that will be radio fodder, and there won't be any greater cultural significance to them. You're looking for the songs that spread to everybody -- people who listen to the radio and people who just happen to hear them in public."
The record labels make winning 'song of the summer' part of the strategy these days, cashing in on the popularity contest with single sales and streams and tour tickets.
No wonder 'This Summer's Gonna Hurt' is out now from Maroon 5.
Bu Ross suggests lending an ear to Major Lazer & DJ Snake with 'Lean On.'
"It's not as well-known as some of the other contenders," he explains, "But it has been a British number one song, and it probably has been the song that the most radio program directors mention to me. It's a song a lot of people feel passionately about."
Then there's the Jamaican artist Omi, whose 'Cheerleader' — another British #1 — gained momentum across the globe when it was remixed by Felix Jaehn.
"This song has already been the song of the summer in Australia -- it was a hit there four or five months ago," Ross says. "It's breezy, it's positive, it's not party-like-it's-the-last-night-of-your-life, but it will sound great at a party. It's both dance and reggae."
Taylor Swift's 'Bad Blood' is generating more buzz for its video than for the song itself.
"Taylor has come pretty close in years before," says Ross. "If 'Shake It Off' had come out a few weeks earlier [last year], that could have been the summer song. This year, she's come out with a very talked-about new video which has already broken viewership records. I don't know if it will be the fun, uptempo summer hit, but it will certainly be a record you hear everywhere this summer."
Nicki Minaj wants to leave her 'pinkprint' on this beach season, with 'The Night is Still Young' — and in 'Hey Mama,' a David Guetta track on which she features.
While the Wiz Khalifa-Charlie Puth track 'See You Again' — the 'Furious 7' tribute to the late actor Paul Walker — is proving hard to beat on the charts, Ross believe it's too elegiac to take this year's summer song title.
There's also an outside chance the song of the summer might be something we haven't yet heard — like The Weeknd's forthcoming release that's promised to be uptempo and Michael Jackson-esque. But Ross says the timing — a release after Memorial Day — puts pressure on the tune.
"There are always a few superstar records that come out at the beginning of summer," he says. "It generally now takes long enough for a song to ramp up at radio that a song would have to be phenomenal to become the song of the summer."
