"A Bar Song" and the NY Bar: Shaboozey, Drake, and scalable value in a financialized music industry

In their “Year in Music 2024” post to their station website, Jacksonville, Florida Hip hop station Power 106.1 declared that “Women Run The World of Hip Hop.” NPR declared around the same time that “Southern women are shaping the sound of hip-hop's future.” Earlier in the year, BET observed that women outnumbered men in the “Song of the Year” category at their Hip Hop Awards five to four, and proclaimed that “these artists not only showcase the immense talent of women in rap today but also demonstrate that women are at the forefront of shaping hip-hop's future.” Robin James has shown how the performance of feminine resilience allows femme pop stars to exhibit the kind of “scalable” value-generation that financialized markets expect of good investments: because patriarchy sets women back, their performance has much more room for growth. Given the genre’s traditional association with the performance of hypermasculinity, these “women run hip hop” narratives are a version of such resilience discourse.

In 2024, the only men in hip hop with breakout success leveraged the affordances of the financialized music and media industries to find other ways to create scale besides flipping feminized damage into a spectacle of resilience. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” dominated the Billboard Hot 100. This hip hop-country hybrid tapped into what Andrew DeWaard calls the logic of “derivative media” to open out a single piece of intellectual property, such as a comics franchise, to as many markets as possible. Whereas “Old Town Road” did this with a series of various genre-inflected remixes, “A Bar Song” was designed to game the charts by appealing to a variety of different radio formats simultaneously. As Chris Molanphy reports,

the team promoting Shaboozey had an ambitious plan to get his hit on as many radio formats as possible. Simply put, it worked: Billboard reports that “A Bar Song” is the first single to crack the top 10 on the magazine’s Pop Airplay, Country Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay, and Rhythmic Airplay charts. (Those last two formats are stations that play current pop for adult audiences and those that play a mix of R&B, rap, and dance, respectively.)

Radio airplay is one of the factors contributing to a song’s position on the Hot 100 chart, so getting a song played on as many different radio stations as possible is a way to “scale” its chart-value (i.e., ...