Intro: Too “Smooth”

To listen to the radio in the early 2000s was to hear the song “Smooth,” a Latin pop-rock juggernaut by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas that features the most recognizable guitar riff in modern music. The song’s overwhelming ubiquity has given it multiple lives: first as an unavoidable earworm, then as an overplayed annoyance, and finally as a nostalgia-driven meme.

Released in 1999, “Smooth” was a radio sensation, spending 12 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, a feat never achieved by The Beatles, Michael Jackson, or The Rolling Stones. I distinctly remember hearing a promo for the very radio station I was listening to that featured “Smooth,” immediately followed by the song itself, as if to say, “We’re a radio station that plays ‘Smooth,’ and here you go.”

The track remained a longstanding staple of mainstream culture and later became an ironic internet fascination for millennials. In 2013, The Onion lampooned the song’s inescapability with the headline: “Smooth Sweeps the Grammys for the 13th Year in a Row.” A few years earlier, Billboard ranked “Smooth” as the second most popular song in the history of the Hot 100—topped only by “The Twist.”

And then things got weird. In 2016, a picture of a fan-made T-shirt saluting the track was posted on Twitter and was later retweeted by Rob Thomas.

Suddenly, a 15-year-old song was back in the zeitgeist, as the internet rediscovered and ironically celebrated its former ubiquity.

What fascinates me most about this “Smooth”-centric discourse was its meta quality: people were celebrating the song for having once been so universally celebrated. “Smooth” is one of many monolithic tracks binge-played to the point of meme-ification, alongside hits like “Wonderwall,” “The Dog Days are Over,” and “Ho Hey.”

Unlike film and TV, a single piece of music can be consumed multiple times in a concentrated period, with this repetition often enhancing its effect. This binge behavior raises a question central to today’s analysis: What dictates a song’s repeatability? Is there a quantifiable trend to the way music is repeatedly consumed (and later disposed)?

So today, we’ll explore the most repeat-worthy songs, how this behavior coincides with listener age, and how our relationship with binge-listening evolves as our cultural