‘Choosin’ Texas’ is the biggest No. 1 song ever—and you might have never heard it
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‘Choosin’ Texas’ is the biggest No. 1 song ever—and you might have never heard it
The end of September was momentous for country fans and chart nerds alike: Ella Langley’s hit “Choosin’ Texas” became the first song to spend 24 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, passing the 22-week mark held by Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” But observers seem eager to put an asterisk next to this single in the record books.
The pop star Doja Cat claimed she was unaware of Langley. Fortune Magazine went further: “most U.S. music fans don’t know her name.” “My job requires me to listen to music…was it possible that a song that had been number one on Billboard for almost half a year [had] not graced my ears?” the Canadian journalist and broadcaster Alan Cross wondered. A CNN article echoed the sentiment, noting that “lots and lots of people say they’ve never heard it.”
How can a record-breaker also be a track that people insist they’ve never encountered? These dismissive reactions are becoming more common as old mainstream unifiers like radio and television lose their power and hits come from a wider range of genres.
A similar skepticism greeted last year’s announcement that Bad Bunny would perform at the Super Bowl. He was the most-played artist on Spotify from 2020 to 2022. Still, the NFL’s pick sparked confusion and sometimes vitriol. President Trump said he had “never heard of” the Puerto Rican star.
Once seen as appealing to relatively narrow audiences, country and Latin music have both enjoyed explosive growth recently. In 2020, country was responsible for 67 billion streams in the U.S., and Latin produced 50.7 billion. By 2025, the two genres were each generating around 120 billion streams annually. Artists in either space can now score colossal hits without necessarily becoming household names.
New household names in any genre are vanishingly rare. Attention is split across a million platforms, and your TikTok algorithm is different from your neighbor’s. “A multiweek No. 1 can pass people by,” said Leslie Fram, CEO of the music consultancy Femco. “That’s not a failure of the song; it’s a feature of how culture works when media is no longer centralized.”
Despite that lack of centralization, and all the chatter about not hearing “Choosin’ Texas,” it was the top streamed title in 11 of the 15 biggest American markets this summer, according to the entertainment analytics company Luminate.
That makes Langley’s hit as dominant as the “KPop Demon Hunters” juggernaut “Golden” last summer. “Choosin’ Texas” also had broader regional appeal than Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” in the warm months of 2024 or Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” two years before that.
Two of the markets where Langley’s hit wasn’t the streaming champion this summer were the largest and most media-heavy. Los Angeles preferred Ariana Grande’s “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” while New York looped Olivia Rodrigo’s “Stupid Song.”
This dynamic is familiar in Nashville. “L.A. and New York have arguably never understood why country has been such a big deal,” said Scott Borchetta, founder and chairman of Big Machine Records. As a result, artists from the genre “are inherently underestimated in terms of their ability to dominate,” said Johnny Cloherty, CEO of the Nashville-based digital marketing company Genni.
Country stalwarts like Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney have never cracked the top 10 on the Hot 100. Yet they have sold more than 84 million and 100 million albums in the U.S., respectively, according to the RIAA, putting them in the same rarefied air as Aerosmith and Queen.
Now that country fans have embraced streaming, the genre is also flexing its muscle on the Hot 100. Taylor Swift pivoted to pop to court a bigger audience in 2014, but today’s country stars can stay put and still match, or even outdo, pop’s biggest names.
In addition to “Choosin’ Texas,” Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” is also one of the longest-running No. 1 hits, with 16 weeks atop the chart. Zach Bryan performed for north of 112,000 fans at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor last year, marking the largest ticketed concert ever in the U.S.
Latin music has demonstrated a similar knack for cultivating a broader base without making concessions to the mainstream. Twenty-five years ago, Shakira had to record in English to score major U.S. hits. This is no longer a requirement. “I’m never going to [sing in English] just because someone says I need to do it to reach a certain audience,” Bad Bunny told Vanity Fair. Luminate found that his “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” album was the fifth most popular release in the U.S. in 2025.
Modern stars have one key advantage over their predecessors in every genre: 30 years ago, buying a record or CD counted as one sale no matter how many times a fan played it. But streaming captures repeat listening.
It turns out that “the hits stay on people’s playlists,” explained Gary Trust, Billboard’s managing director of charts and data operations. And contemporary radio stations often magnify this tendency, continuing to program a handful of the same popular tracks as long as listeners don’t turn the dial.
That means the biggest hits linger. No single had ever lasted 40 weeks in the top 10 before 2020. Since then, eight have crossed that threshold.
This climate has helped Langley—and her rivals. While “All I Want for Christmas Is You” came out in 1994, it didn’t hit No. 1 until 2019. All of its 22 chart-topping weeks came over the past few years as the masses have pivoted to holiday playlists after Halloween; it’s all but certain to pad its total this December.
Meanwhile, “Choosin’ Texas” is still snaring new listeners through pop radio, and Drake borrowed Langley’s hook for his song “Solar Eclipse.” “This is a cultural moment,” Borchetta said. “There’s no arguing it.”
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I have heard this song before seeing this article, and I think it is a very pleasant new era country song.
But if it had been written , produced and performed by AI it wouldnt have surprised me a bit. AI is very very good at writing catchy songs.
Though, as George Patton says at the end of the movie Patton, "Fame is fleeting".
Bing Crosby had 42 #1 hit records during the 1920's , 30's and 40's. He is (was?) without a doubt one of the most popular singers of the 20th century. You could argue he was the most popular based on the 42 #1s, yet I'd bet money very few people today under the age of 40 have ever heard his records (other than the Christmas and possibly the Irish ones) and the vast majority of people under 25 have never even heard his name.
The very fact that so many people have evidently never heard of Choosin Texas, or Ella Langley for that matter, indicates how dispersed music has become.