By Anton Dedvukaj
Hello everyone, and welcome back to “Mic Drop”. For our first entry of the new year, I wanted to discuss something that’s come up every so often in the music scene, including most recently this past week: movie soundtracks.
Movie soundtracks have always had some form of ubiquity in popular culture, and we’ve seen loads of soundtrack hits over the past couple of years. If you want an example, all you need to do is look at the current Hot 100 for this week. Billboard just reported on Monday that the new No. 1 song on the Hot 100 is “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from the Encanto soundtrack.
That movie’s soundtrack has broken through to the Hot 100 in a big way. For example, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” isn’t even the soundtrack’s only top ten hit, as “Surface Pressure” also sits at No. 9, and plenty more songs from the soundtrack have broken through to the lower portion of the charts.
This recent surge in popularity for the movie’s soundtrack had me thinking about other soundtracks that made some headway into the popular music scene. Most recently, there were three soundtracks that had some chart success in 2019. The Frozen II soundtrack went to number one on the Billboard 200 albums chart and had a few low-charting songs. However, the two bigger stories were Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and A Star is Born. The former was responsible for “Sunflower”, which was a No. 1 single and one of the biggest hits of that year, while the latter had a couple of minor hits, most notably the chart-topping “Shallow”.
With the recent discussion of soundtrack hits in the music industry, I decided to take a look at some of the biggest hits from the genre in recent years and try to take a look at what soundtrack songs actually go on to become lasting hits.
Here’s one thing that I have noticed: for musicals, you can’t go wrong with a cast member composition. Encanto’s hits, for instance, have all been directly from the movie and the compositions that have become popular are the ones that appear in the movie.
Musicals have historically ordered pop singers to cover their big musical numbers, but they rarely take off. For reference, Idina Menzel’s version of “Let it Go” was a top five hit on the Hot 100 in 2014, and is clearly way better remembered than the Demi Lovato cover. Even more recently, despite hits from Moana, The Greatest Showman, and Frozen II having covers attached to them, the versions of, say, “How Far I’ll Go”, “This is Me”, or “Into the Unknown” that charted higher were the versions performed by the movie’s cast members, not the pop covers. The Encanto songs further prove this, as no cover songs have even been released, and yet they’re still all performing remarkably well on the Hot 100.
However, that’s not to say that soundtrack hits can’t be from established stars. However, these hits generally come from commissioned soundtracks that are featured in the movie, but not performed by characters. Post Malone and Swae Lee saw “Sunflower” become one of the top 100 biggest hit songs of all time, and their version was an original made for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Kendrick Lamar commissioned the soundtrack for Black Panther in 2018, and he saw three hits that year from that soundtrack. Namely, “King’s Dead” with Jay Rock, Future, and James Blake nearly broke the top 20, “All the Stars” with SZA and “Pray For Me” with The Weeknd were both top ten hits, and all three made the 2018 Year-End Hot 100.
Finally, most of the biggest movie soundtracks tend to be songs that can work outside of the movie that they’re featured in. The main reason for this is that a song will work way better on radio stations or in people’s own personal curated playlists if the song can function as a typical listening experience. You can resonate with the Black Panther or A Star is Born soundtrack hits without knowing the greater context of how those songs fit into their movies. Sure, a song may work better in the context of its movie than as a stand-alone single, but as long as it can be separated from its movie without difficulty, it should work. It’s not a requirement for a song to be only loosely tied to its source material in order to be a hit – as evidenced by the enduring popularity of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, a song that directly references characters in its source movie – but it often helps.
All in all, soundtrack hits could be either by established hitmakers or just movie cast members, but the point is that they usually have to work as songs that can connect to a larger audience outside of fans of the movie.
