Beyonce's 'Lemonade': Where are the pop hits?

Welcome to “song of the summer” season, where music’s biggest stars duke it out for the season’s biggest pop hit. So far, 2016’s top contenders include perennial favorites like Drake, Rihanna and Justin Timberlake, all names you’d expect to see topping the pop charts.

But missing from that list is the artist who’s arguably impacted music in 2016 the most: Beyoncé. While Lemonade continues to perform well on the charts, its singles haven’t captured the same attention, absent from the upper tier of Billboard’s pop charts.

“Lemonade may more be the album of the summer,” says Billboard associate director of charts/radio Gary Trust, pointing out that while Sorry rose to No. 11 on the Hot 100 last week, with a new video debuting on YouTube, “there hasn’t been the big pop hit single" off the album.

Sales numbers corroborate that statement, with Sorry selling 499,000 copies and Formation coming in at 522,000, compared with One Dance’s 1.3M sales and Can’t Stop The Feeling’s 1.2M according to Nielsen data as of June 21, with Lemonade’s radio spins also coming in well behind Drake and Timberlake.

“[Lemonade] has continued to do very well,” says David Bakula, Nielsen Entertainment’s senior vice president of analytics, citing the album’s steady chart performance. “But I don’t think there’s any one song on there that’s standing out.”

So why isn’t Beyoncé continuing her 2016 domination onto the pop songs charts? Experts point out that as Beyoncé has transformed from a charts-climbing pop musician into the influential star she is today, she’s actively moved away from being a singles-oriented artist.

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“You think the name Beyoncé, and you think ‘absolute superstar.’ But she hasn’t had a top 10 hit on Billboard’s pop songs charts since 2010,” Trust says, referring to her Lady Gaga collaboration Telephone.

Unlike her early albums, packed with top-10 songs, Beyoncé’s previous three albums  — 2011’s 4, 2014’s Beyoncé and Lemonade —  have been more R&B focused, lessening her grip on the pop charts.

It’s not like she’s gone out and written songs with Max Martin and went, ‘Oh yeah, I want major pop hits again,’” Trust says. “She’s had two big top 5 hits at R&B radio [with Sorry and Formation], so that tells you where her support at radio is right now.”

This shift happened after 2008’s hits-packed I Am ... Sasha Fierce. “[Sasha Fierce] had Single Ladies, If I Were A Boy, Sweet Dreams and Halo, four Billboard Hot 100 top-ten songs, which is a big deal," Trust says. "And then she comes back with 4, and that didn’t have any top 10’s on the Hot 100.”

“It’s pretty telling — not that fans went away, or that she suddenly lost her talent. She just really followed her heart, and went more R&B, and the charts reflect that.”

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Beyoncé’s absence from the pop charts doesn’t mean her profile has slipped in the Beyhive’s eyes. “She’s gotten really into these new ways to reach fans, and as music consumption changes and people aren’t buying albums like they used to, you really need to find a way to cut through all the noise when it comes to releases,” Trust says. “She’s doing that on such a bigger level than almost anyone.”

And by willfully conceding the “songs-of-summer” race to Drake and Timberlake, Beyoncé may be reflecting current industry trends shifting away from a summertime singles.

“When we think about the songs of the summer, we think about the most popular songs coming out at any given time ... when everyone’s at the beach, everyone’s listening to the radio, sharing their favorite songs,” Bakula says. “That has become more 365.”

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And after all, having a “song of the summer” doesn’t guarantee an artist staying power. “If you look at recent years, there are a lot of artists who came out of nowhere — Carly Rae Jepsen, OMI, even Robin Thicke’s career peak with Blurred Lines,” Trust says about past summer hits.

When music listeners look back at 2016, it’s likely that they’ll remember Lemonade more than a song from the Trolls soundtrack (Timberlake's Feeling). “Beyoncé played the Super Bowl, it doesn’t get any bigger than who she is,” Trust says. “And at this point, the one missing ingredient is the big pop hit single, but it doesn’t even seem to matter at this point.”