"Country music is evolving," Lil Nas X wrote atop the video. Before he started making music, Lil Nas X courted viral fame on the social media platform, and Old Town Road, in essence, debuted as a meme - serving as the soundtrack to a 29-second clip of a man dancing enthusiastically at a rodeo. That's how many retweets the video that introduced Old Town Road to the world has received since Lil Nas X shared a snippet on Twitter in December. Meanwhile, a compilation video of TikToks inspired by the song has been viewed more than 8 million times. An official animoji video for the same version has clocked more than 69 million views. The audio-only YouTube video of Cyrus's remix has received more than 370 million views since it was uploaded in April. stream panini to celebrate you guys," he tweeted when Billboard announced Old Town Road would hold the top spot for the 19th straight week.
Sometimes, Lil Nas X's strategies are more direct. The rapper-singer used social media to suggest a collaboration with Lil Uzi Vert, who also found early success on SoundCloud and told TMZ he was open to collaborating. Currently at 36 on the Hot 100, Panini could take a page from Old Town Road and boost its digital footprint with a remix - a fact not lost on Lil Nas X. While his EP has received lukewarm reviews, Lil Nas X seems primed to repeat his strategies for other songs, including his second single, Panini. 1 days before, the Cyrus remix kicked things into high gear, landing a record-breaking 143 million streams (across all platforms) in one week. It also made it onto the Hot 100 and the Hot Rap Songs charts before Rolling Stone reported its removal from the country chart.
By the end of January, the song had hit one million plays on Spotify alone. But the song's streaming success - a key metric for Billboard's contemporary methodology - predates the country controversy. In June, the data firm Nielsen revealed that Old Town Road had been streamed more than one billion times through on-demand audio- and video-streaming platforms (i.e. On SoundCloud, where Lil Nas X first released Old Town Road, his bio notes (in typical Gen Z parlance) that "old town road is not my only song tho fr". One week later, Old Town Road galloped to the top of Billboard's Hot 100 chart, where it remained for a record-breaking 19 weeks before being dethroned in late August by Billie Eilish's Bad Guy. Amid the controversy, country veteran Billy Ray Cyrus hopped on a widely praised remix.
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But it wasn't until April, when Rolling Stone reported that Billboard had quietly removed Old Town Road from the Hot Country Songs chart, that the genre-bending earworm became a cultural phenomenon.īillboard's decision ignited a debate about how to classify the song - which Lil Nas X has described as "country trap" - and whether it would have stayed on the country chart if it had been recorded by a white artist. It even landed, unceremoniously, on several Billboard charts - including the one measuring popular country songs. Over the next few months, the indie song by a little-known artist called Lil Nas X found fans on SoundCloud and music-streaming apps.
Equal parts country twang and hip-hop bass, Old Town Road lent itself well to cowboy memes and line-dance riffs. Late last year, a delightfully strange song began to make its way around the teen-favourite social app TikTok.
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