The biggest song of 2025
Rosé & Bruno Mars’ “APT.” was recently crowned the #1 selling song of 2025 by the IFPI, music’s global representative body. The one after that is KPop Demon Hunters’s “Golden”. Mars comes back at #4 with “Die With A Smile”, his (other) duet with Lady Gaga.
This immediately gives us a couple of insights:
“APT.” is an absolute stand-out hit, having had to beat real tough competition for the top spot. Its number of streams and Youtube views are interestingly close — around 2.4 billion each at the time of this writing. In other words, close to 5 billion total…
K-pop is king (or queen), effectively claiming the top #2 songs in the chart. This is not exactly news to music fans out there, merely confirmation of a years-long trend;
Bruno Mars is the king (or queen) maker, being equally successful with his own music and his collaborations, no matter what they look like: Rosé and Lady Gaga are very different beasts, but they are both musical beasts, and Mars beautifully highlighted that…
There have been many stories told about “APT.”: its origin as a Korean drinking game; the fact that Rosé was unsure whether she wanted to release it (arguably, her superstar girl band image might not fully coincide with said type of game); the fact that Bruno Mars came later in the mix and insisted on adding his “stank” to the song, as producer and co-writer Cirkut put it; the fact that Mars added the bridge in the process, kind of like how Eddie Van Halen reworked the “Beat It” arrangement when he came to record his (supposedly incognito) solo…
Whatever the reason(s) why this song had something different about it, it just did. The chorus barely even features one chord in it: it is effectively an a cappella chant stuck on top of a drum section. That’s it. But it is one hell of a catchy drum section: the infectious nature of this song is, if anything, its absolute relentlessness. It makes you wanna dance, or at the very least sing along. Then you have that Mars bridge towards the end that adds just a tad more excitement to the whole thing with its intense high notes…
What really sealed the deal for me was the reaction my then 4 1/2 year-old had upon hearing it at home. Turns out the team at her school played it a lot: she immediately recognized it, started jumping around and singing along. The last song she did that to was “Baby Shark”. I don’t know whether it means “APT.” is for toddlers or that it’s so universally appealing even kids buy into it, but I choose to believe the latter.