The dreamy, percolating “Flowers” sounds like an unofficial sequel to “ Watermelon Sugar,” a summery vibe reinforced by the sultry, skin-baring video, much of which finds Miley lounging poolside in a two-piece that’s closer to lingerie than a bikini. Hull and Johnson were the ones who shifted Styles from a classic rock–indebted sound to beachy, radio-friendly technopop, and they’ve basically pulled the same trick for Cyrus. The even more telling collaborators are the song’s producers, whom I’ve discussed in this series before: Thomas “ Kid Harpoon” Hull and Tyler Johnson, the masterminds behind Harry Styles’ chart conquest. She co-wrote the song with Michael Pollack and Gregory “Aldae” Hein, journeymen who’ve penned numerous hits including several Justin Bieber tracks in particular, Pollack co-wrote Bieber’s “ Ghost,” a massive pop-radio hit last spring that has a bit of “Flowers” in its DNA. Cyrus generated it with some heavyweight electropop svengalis. I wouldn’t call “Flowers” enormously catchier than those prior hits, but it is right on trend. “Flowers” already broke Spotify’s all-time weekly streaming record. That’s already the best any Cyrus single has done at radio in a decade, since her post–Hannah Montana, late-’00s–early-’10s heyday. And finally, the song opens to a radio audience of nearly 34 million, immediately placing it 18 th in airplay after just one week. The early warning that this song was going to open big came late last week from Spotify, which announced that Cyrus’ jam had set a new all-time weekly streaming record: more than 100 million streams globally in seven days, breaking the previous mark set by BTS’s 2021 smash “ Butter.” (Note: Some of this is pure technology adoption-Spotify is now used by more people in general than it was two years ago, and this record is probably going to be reset several more times in the next few years-but that doesn’t diminish the Cyrus song’s stunning achievement.) When Billboard announced the new Hot 100 a couple of days later, “Flowers” was predictably the week’s top streamer, with 52.6 million US streams, about 50 percent higher than SZA’s “Kill Bill.” In digital sales, “Flowers” shifted 70,000 dollar-downloads, the biggest one-week sales total since Swift’s “Anti-Hero” arrived last fall. The short answer to the question we ask ’round these parts- why is this song No. 1?-is that “Flowers” is blowing up in all three metrics that comprise the Hot 100.
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