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Did you know that Ella Langley named her chart topping album Dandelion that? Because there is a dandelion herbal tea that is made to cure hangovers. And if you're a fan of Ella Langley like myself, you would know that her breakup break up. Oh my gosh, you guys. Dyslexia, her breakout album in 2023 and follow up album in 2024 which featured chart topping songs like you look like you love me and my personal favorite weren't for the Wind. The album was called Hungover and still hungover. And she revealed this in her interview with I think it's called Katie on the radio. I'll link it out below. It's a really great interview. It was ahead of the release of her album Dandelion and she said that she knew the title, that it was going to be called Dandelion because they were working at a writers camp one day and they knew her upcoming album at the time in 2023 was hungover and she said she loved to have a song titled Dandelion eventually. And the guy was like, well, Dandelion herbal tea cures hangovers. So she always knew that was going to be the follow up to her two albums. Since then, her country songs like Truth in Texas have gone on to break Billboard Hot 100 records, not even held by mega stars like Taylor Swift's. She also broke records at the American Country Music Awards show when she swept with seven awards, something no one has ever done in one night. Ella Langley is someone that I've been a fan of for a while and one day I would love to have her on the Middle Row podcast that happened with Slater where when she came on I actually showed her and her team. Like I had an email that I'd sent her in like 2023 where I was like, I'd love to have you on my show. And then it didn't end up happening for three more years. And I had reached out to Ella Langley when she had like a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Now she has like 4 million followers and no longer has an email in her bio. And that's when you know someone is super famous is when they no longer have an email in their bio. Weren't for the Wind was my second most streamed song on Spotify last year. And I can honestly say that her and Noah Khan have slowly converted me into being a genuine country music fan. Which got me thinking, if the 2010s were dominated by hip hop and soundcloud rap, how did the pendulum swing the to the opposite end? With country music now completely eclipsing even pop music in popularity 10 years later, this is a question that I will be attempting to answer in this episode of the Middle Row with Coco Moco Podcast. Again, thank you all so much for all of the new people that have been tuning in. We have so many new listeners and eyes on this show. As I'm filming this this morning, we were in the lobby waiting for someone to arrive and I got a notification on my phone that sparked Spotify's Instagram Official Instagram 14 million followers had shouted out the Middle Row of Coco Moco Podcast as a video Podcast of the Month right alongside complex and close friends by Instagram with like Cat's Eye and Larray. It's just insane. Like the amount of new attention that the show is getting. It's been three years in the making and I'm so grateful. And if you guys ever want to leave me reviews on Apple and Spotify with topics you want me to dive into, or you can leave names of artists that you want me to have on, or you can do that in the YouTube comments wherever it's easiest for you to press the buttons. All of that is really helpful though. I want to cast your mind back to 2018 if you open Spotify or pulled up the Billboard Hot 100. The cultural landscape was almost unrecognizable from where we are today. Drake's Scorpion album was breaking single day streaming records. According to Billboard SoundCloud, rap was the biggest gold rush that major labels had seen in the decade. You had Lil Uzi, Vert, XXXTentacion and Lil Pump all sitting in the Hot 100s top tier. And if a pop star wanted a real chance at a hit. I even remember when the no Jumper podcast was massive in the late 2010s because they were getting the first and sometimes last interviews with major artists before they went mainstream or came to their unfortunate untimely deaths, such as X, Juice, WRLD and Lil Peep. Actually, it's crazy to say you guys, but the no Jumper podcast is partly what inspired Middle Row. Because in the 2010s I was in college and I was so fascinated at how Adam22 had this ability to get on artists first right before they blew up, such as Juice, wrld, such as Shoreline Mafia and X. And. And I was like I want to do that but for pop music in a way and like my own way. So just a fun fact about this show, it was partly inspired by no Jumper. Fast forward to right now, May of 2026 as I'm filming this and something genuinely tectonic has happened. Pop is going through an identity crisis with some of the biggest pop artists struggling to put up a fight on the charts alongside country heavy hitters like Morgan Wallen and ella Langley. From 2018 to 2021, 55% of the most streamed songs globally were hip hop titles according to graphs about music. But in 2026 they only make up 23% of the market share. And contemporary country music has executed one of the most quietly brilliant marketing coups in modern chart history. A formerly overlooked Gen X and boomer leaning radio play exclusive genre has now eclipsed almost all other types of music on the charts and in streams. And a great way to understand this is through the evolution of Ella Langley. Someone else who is a really good like litmus test for where culture is, who really has their finger on the pulse. That I think is so fascinating is like look at what Diplo is doing. I was having this conversation this morning over coffee when I was prepping this episode and we were talking about how diplo, when the 2000s trap like underground scene Soundcloud was getting really big. He was collaborating with artists like Trippy Red. Now Diplo is performing at Stagecoach and aligning himself with country artists. Also works with K pop artists. He was working on the last BTS album for example. So if you guys really want to know like where culture is headed in the music world, Diplo is like just I would say oddly someone has their finger on the pulse. But it's not odd because I do think a DJ's job is to understand the cultural zeitgeist and like where it's headed. But back to Ella Langley. Let's talk about her evolution. Really understand the power dynamics of the music business inverted. You have to look at what Ella Langley did in the last six weeks. Specifically, she's the Alabama native who spent years playing acoustic cover sets in in local bars before signing to Colombia and dropping her debut album Hungover in 2023. The album opened up at a humble number 80 on the Billboard 200 and it took 17 weeks to even crack the top 40 according to Variety. Her sophomore album Dandelion dropped on April 10th of this year and she is blocking even the biggest pop acts like Olivia Rodrigo from hitting some chart milestones on the Billboard Hot 100. The song that began to move the needle for Langley was you look like you love me featuring Riley Green. They have these talking verses that the label had heavily advised her not to use. She said if they don't let her do the talking verses that she wouldn't put out the song. She was influenced by old school country like Johnny Cash, but the talking verses did not fit into the cookie cutter algorithmic assembly line style of creating hit songs today where the melody has to be fast and easily digestible with no slow moments in between. This song is the first one of hers that charted and that is how I discovered her. It's a great example that sometimes breaking the rules when it feels authentic is the best way to stand out from the noise and oversaturated competition around you. That might all be following the same formula. And one way is an artist that she eventually convinced her label to put out. This song is her and Riley Green would perform it live at festivals and they saw the reaction from the audience and that was how they were able to convince the label between you look like you love me and Choosing Texas was my favorite song that charted, which was weren't for the wind. The idea for Ella Langley's most popular song Choosing Texas came from a run in that Miranda Lambert had with a cop while she had a pet kangaroo in her passenger seat. The craziness of having a kangaroo and dog in her car led to the cop letting her off without a ticket. Miranda joked, of course I had Texas plates too. That's when Ella sang She's from Texas, I can tell while walking to the bathroom, the chord progression came to her she's from Texas. I can tell by the way she's two stepping around the room. And Miranda is the one that suggested it be a love triangle. A modern day Jolene. So instead of talking about she's from Texas or He's from Texas, you're now talking about a third person. The song was then created in 30 to 45 minutes. You can hear more of that story in her interview with Katie on the radio. Again, another treasure mine of cool anecdotes for this podcast episode that I created. So I encourage you guys all to go to that source material and watch it. That being said, her single Choosing Texas is currently sitting on its 10th non consecutive week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the longest running number one by a female country artist in history, according to Whiskey. Is Ella Langley overtaking the Billboard charts, but she's also breaking records within her own country niche. On May 17, 2026, she walked into the 61st Annual ACM Awards in Vegas and won every single category that she was nominated in. Seven trophies in one night in including Female Artists of the Year, Song of the Year, Single of the year and Artist Songwriter of the Year that shattered the previous all time record of six wins in a single night, a record that had been jointly held by Garth Brooks, Faith Hill and Chris Stapleton across 2025 and 2026 ceremonies combined. She now has 12 ACMs, beating Faith Hill's previous record of 10 awards in two years. This is not a stroke of luck. This is one of the most calculated masterclasses in modern marketing execution that I've ever seen. One that ditches short, quick viral hits and focuses on world building and strategic collaboration. The commercial eclipse of mainstream pop and hip hop by contemporary country is not a random shift in consumer taste. It's a structural victory achieved by country music's transition from disposable single driven digital releases into high retention world building lifestyle environments. And another brilliant, Another branding brilliant move by Ella Langley is a term that I coined about two years ago on TikTok that honestly kind of gave me the platform I have now. And it's what I call the Hollywood Hair Theory. This is the philosophy that your hair is the most important visual element of when it comes to predicting someone's fame and if they will become a household name. Look at all of the most biggest stars to take off. What did they do right before they found fame? They changed something about their hair. So look at pictures of before and after, of Ice Spice when she went from normal hair to this like orange bob. You also have Sabrina Carpenter when she switched from a dirty blonde wavy beach hair to a very intentional 60s blonde bombshell hair. Also thanks to her stylist Jared Elner who helped with that vision. You also have Marilyn Monroe when you look at pictures of her natural mousy brown hair, you won't recognize her versus that blonde bob. Even Michael Jackson's famous black hair mullet with his like red leather jacket. And you have Chapel Roan when she went from her natural strawberry blonde to a really intentional dark auburn red. Your hair is so important in becoming famous. And I will even say for myself, not that I'm famous, but my hair. I notice I get recognized more out when I have my hair bob like flipped up like this. If I have my hair in a bun, no one comes up to me. Literally no one. Or they're just like don't care, don't know who she is. Which is also fair. But when I have this bob I get stopped a lot. And I recently went to the Met Gala with Meta, like a Meta event at the Mark Hotel for the Met Gala and I wore a blonde wig and I've never gotten more hate in my life. Yes, the blonde wig was botched when they put it on me because they forgot their wig glue. But also like I understood in that moment how emotionally invested people are in my brown hair. Like it was like I like personally offended them that I changed it. So it was just an interesting moment that I never realized that I had my own version of Hollywood hair theory happening unintentionally. Ella Langley, she had this like natural brown hair, but it's when she began taking her authentic self and finding a way to turn up the notch by a thousand. That's what marketing is. It's finding what makes you best and then turning that dial up. She got bangs and in her Get Ready with Me videos you can see them installing clip in extensions to her already really long and luscious brown hair. And the big the bangs have become their own character in her world and comment section. She even posts TikToks now about how she does her bangs because of how much of a character they are in her world. Building your Hollywood hair theory. What makes you iconic visually with your hair and how can you dial that up by a hundred? Don't be afraid to experiment and get it wrong at first, because sometimes the way that you figure out what you are is by first figuring out what you aren't. But now back to Ella. The thing about like the modern pop and rap playbook is that it has one almost massive fatal flaw. It relies almost entirely on the ephemeral single drop. Labels have conditioned their artists to chase the short form audio viral moments where they isolate a 15 second hook. Pray the TikTok algorithm bites. Watch the track tank two weeks later because there's no actual substance behind this trend. According to Billboard, around 80% of the Hot 100 tracks in 2024 gained their initial momentum on TikTok before they ever appeared on the chart. And 13 of the 16 number one songs that year started out as viral TikTok moments. Typical life cycle of one of these viral pop tracks is brutal. Rapid growth for about two to four weeks, peak virality, maybe another one or two, and then a steep decline according to Neon Music. An example of this would be Tommy Richmond's Million Dollar Baby. How do you take a fleeting moment and turn it into a timeless world that an audience wants to visit often? The reason I sometimes fear short form virality is because the shorter the video, the shorter the object permanence is. Country music's marketing angle does the exact opposite. Let's look at the Dandelion rollout American Eagle continued to lean into the Americana branding after working with Sydney Sweeney and Travis Kelsey in 2025 by tapping Ella Langley for their Denim Darling campaign in February of this year. American Eagle is an example of a retail brand that is leaning into the rise of country music and Americana marketing. And while they're getting a ton of backlash for that, the numbers don't lie. And I'm just speaking at this subjectively. Um, you know, I'm not saying either I think it's morally one way or the other. The numbers do not lie when they're leaning into this Americana country music. According to Music Mayhem, the Jeans country campaign which featured Ella Langley drove record denim sales for the brand. In April, she partnered with beach house group Fragrance Noise, becoming the brand's first ever celebrity collaborator. And they had previously avoided celebrity partnerships entirely. And even though they are under the same parent company is like Shay Mitchell's Beat Bays and Tracey Ellis Ross's pattern. The Be her perfume Soft launched at Stavecoach Stagecoach with sampling stations on her tour bus and a Las Vegas event tied to the CMA's. And she's not alone in this. Megan Maroney is now the face of Revlon's Be Unforgettable campaign. Morgan Wallen has built an entire lifestyle ecosystem around his Sugar free Southern Sweet Tea partnership with Ryle and his Last Night Merch Drops, which sell out within hours of release. And Lainey Wilson has a ring Lure Partnership and fans stream Langley's music. They're not just opting into a song. Like maybe if you have a 15 second viral rap song, they're opting into a wardrobe, a perfume, a community and a localized Southern esthetic that has its own visual grammar. The audience is invested in the entire ecosystem, not not just a catchy TikTok song. And that's why these albums get months long chart runs while frantic pop and rap tracks evaporate the second the for you page moves on. Really understand why country is dominating right now and not five years ago. We have to talk about how streaming demographics have radically evolved since the 2010s. During the SoundCloud rap boom of 2017 and 2018, hip hop dominated the Hot 100 because because its core fan base, predominantly Gen Z teenagers, were the earliest and most aggressive adopters of Spotify and Apple music. Younger audiences are typically early adopters of technology, like how now we see Gen Alpha being the ones that consume the growing live stream medium. Gen Z. They were streaming Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Cardi on continuous loops all day, every day, while genres like country and that older audience was still listening to it on the radio or with physical albums. Over the last few years, a massive data inversion has occurred. Streaming subscriptions have reached near total saturation across older and more traditional demographics according to Hit Songs Deconstructed. Country music officially surpassed both pop and hip hop in the first half of 2025 to become the most heavily represented genre in the Billboard Hot 100s top 10. Morgan Wallen alone became the first country artist in the Hot 100s and 66 year history to hold the top three spots simultaneously. According to Luminate, country's share of on demand audio streams in the US has grown 7.71 percentage points outside the US since 2020, with premium streams accelerating fastest in UK, Germany and Australia. Country fan base didn't just start streaming, they fully migrated into the digital ecosystem and brought their high retention traditional album listening habits with them. Look at it like this. A casual pop listener might stream a single three times and then hit skip. A country fan will play an entire 16 track album sequentially in the truck on their way to work. I'm like kind of envisioning like the Landman show, like him in his car, you know, Billy Bob Thorton like that vibe. Morgan Wallens I'm the Problem was the number one album in the US by total consumption and in the first half of 2025 with 2.562 million album equivalent units. According to Luminate, that kind of devotional consumption completely tilts the Billboard chart's weight in Nashville's favor. It's the same fan psychology that built Zach Bryan's career outside of the algorithm. When American Heartbreak dropped as a 34 track album in 2022, fans didn't pick one viral cut, they listened to the whole thing. That's the behavior that country fans have been operating with since before streaming even existed. And now that they've actually arrived on streaming, the rest of the industry is struggling to catch up. There's no more growth for rap or pop, as those fans were heavily early adopters in the 2010s. But with country, those new fan conversions in the past couple of years meant that country music is the one genre that we're seeing the biggest growth spurt. During the peak of the 2010's rap era, mainstream pop stars would actively recruit recruit trending hip hop artists for a guest verse to buy cheap cultural credibility or get an editorial playlist slot. For example, Justin Bieber had Quavo on Intentions, Camilla Cabello got Young Thug on Havana, Ed Sheeran had Cardi b on south of the Border, and I'm not saying that it's cheap in the sense that they're not making good art. It's just they understand that that was the quickest way to get the biggest audience on streaming platforms. The entire pop economy of 2018 was built on rap features as a credibility currency. Today, that power dynamic has flipped and country has officially become the supreme Trojan horse. We've watched titans of pop music completely pivot their sonic towards Nashville because they recognize where consumer engagement is actually dense. Beyonce released Cowboy Carter in March of 2024, which became the first album by a black woman to top the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and went on to an Album of the Year at the Grammys, which I predicted. And I do want to note that just because they're doing it while it's popular, it doesn't mean it's inauthentic. For example, Beyonce herself is from Houston and this country album felt more like a homecoming than her verse, than her chasing a trend. Post Malone followed this country trend in August of 2024 with F1 trillion debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 with 250,000 units and a track list that read like a Country Music hall of Fame inductee list with Dolly parton and Tim McGraw and Blake Shelton. Lana Del Rey confirmed her own country album is on the way called Lasso. I don't know if that's actually coming. Like she hasn't really like followed up on that. And Sabrina Carpenter Slim Pickens off Short and Sweet leans heavily into country pop sound that had been considered career suicide in 2019. The real marketing genius is in how country music uses internal collaborations to incubate and mint its own superstars overnight. Take Langley's breakout smash you look like you Love Me featuring Riley Greene. According to Holler, it didn't start in a sterile corporate writing camp. It began in 2022 over a literal bowl of spaghetti during a casual afternoon writing session. Langley cut it as a solo track. Then, while she was on the road opening for Riley Greene, the two of them organically developed a second verse while on the tour bus and started testing it on grassroots crowds. When they finally dropped the single, it shot number one on the Billboard Country Airplay chart, ending a 51 week drought for solo female country artists in that genre. That song won the Music Event of the year at the 2025 ACMs. Then she did the same thing again this year with their reunion track Don't Mind if I Do, which won them the same award in 2026. She just signed a Morgan Wallen duet, I Can't Love you Anymore, that debuted in the Hot 100s top 10, becoming the first song by two core country acts, each with lead billing, to debut in the top 10 since Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's Islands in the Stream in 1983, according to Billboard. And here is the kicker. Langley has now started flipping that leverage outward, absorbing other genres. Her track Hell at Night, which I freaking love. It's so good with rising pop artists Sorry, rising hip hop you guys. This dyslexia is my you beating me today with Hell at Night with rising hip hop rap artist Big X the Plug. It's doing exactly what pop stars used to do to rap artists in 2018, except it's in the reverse. So now rap artists and pop artists are using country as their Trojan horse. The country ecosystem is now the destination, not just a side departure. Even Tate McCrae collabed with Morgan Wallen last year on their song what I Want. Let's pull back the lens and look at this critically from a trend forecasting angle, because every massive chart boom always carries the seeds of its own exhaustion. The entire engine of contemporary country relies on the concept of authenticity, and country really seeds itself in being contrarian to this artificial pop machine. The narrative tells us that these country artists are raw, unpolished, independent minded storytellers who stand in direct opposition of the hyper manufactured corporate pop stars of the late 2000 and tens and early 2000 and twenties. That's the whole reason fans ran towards Zach, Brian and Noah Khan in the first place. They felt real in a way that the algorithmically optimized pop machine, especially with the boom of TikTok, had stopped feeling. But here's the catch. Authenticity is profitable, which means major labels will try to clone it. We've already seen the writing on the wall. In April 2025, Universal Music Group Nashville reband rebranded itself as Music Corporation of America, and as of that announcement, parent company UMG controlled 39.4% of all of the country music market share. According to Music Row, that's one corporate entity controlling nearly nearly 40% of an entire genre. Industry watchdogs at Country Central have already pointed out that labels are are flooding the market with manufactured versions of whatever character is currently popular, paying influencers to use specific songs in their TikToks and quietly funding creators to claim a track as their new favorite when they've never actually listened to it before. Major Nashville labels are reportedly already scouting independent female artists with explicit corporate instructions to find the Next, Ella Langley trying to turn her specific gray conversational delivery, traditional instrumentals and this, you know, the hair theory into this like standardized corporate checklist, which is the antithesis of what country brands itself as. We've seen this exact move before and it was happening in kind of 2013, 2015, with this bro country era of like Dan and Shea, Florida, Georgia line, Sam Hunt clones. It was this assembly line trap that nearly killed mainstream countries cultural relevance in the first place. If country falls into that same mistake again, manufacturing a wave of grit like female singer songwriters with traditional instrumentals, but corporate songwriting camps behind the curtain, it risks alienating the exact country audience that ran to the genre for refuge. The moment that authenticity becomes another marketing template, the whole chart bubble burst and it becomes inflated. One of the ways that I love to tell people, when I'm advising people or I'm consulting artists, brands, whatever it might be, they always say, like, authenticity is a buzzword. It was the Webster Miriam word of the year in 2023 because so many people used it so much. Everyone always says authenticity, authenticity. But like, no one says what that means. Like, what does it mean? You know, I always think of this. Authenticity is doing whatever you would be doing whether a camera is filming you or not. So if you're an artist and you sign to a label and they're like, we want you to get brown bangs, we want you to have a talking verse, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it's giving Ella Langley. If those are not decisions you would have made whether a camera was filming you or not, then it's not authentic. So do the things that you would be doing whether it's being documented or not. That is how you know that it's authentic to you. Love to know what you guys think in the comments. The numbers don't lie. Again, there can be a whole moral discussion around country and the Americana branding, especially with like the American eagle of it all that I'm curious to have that discussion. But ultimately, the numbers literally do not lie. Country music has fundamentally rewritten the rules of chart dominance by building immersive ecosystems, capitalizing on a massive streaming demographic shift that pop labels and rap labels completely missed by focusing solely on quick drops versus immersive album world building. But I want to hear from you guys, the coconuts. Are we looking at a permanent generational shift in what defines popular music? Because again, the pop genre is short for popular music. So is the thesis of this episode is, is country music eclipsing pop music? Or is country music now pop music? Nashville about to maybe play itself as it tries to industrialize this concept of raw authenticity. Is Ella Langley the blueprint for the future of the music business? Or will the corporate cloning machine eventually water her down into a hundred lesser versions of herself? And how can she specifically outlive that? How can she, you know, continue to be firm in her branding while also evolving with her audience? I think those are all really interesting questions to ask. And obviously what she's doing is right because I'm now. She's literally turned me into a country fan, which is so crazy. When I did an episode last, last year with one of the heads of pop like Spotify's Playlist editorial, Cecilia Winter, and she was telling me that I was. We were looking at my. My listening habits and I had all this pop music except Ella Langley. And she said, we've actually noticed that there is a spike in women that listen to pop music for some reason, converting to Ella Langley specifically. They don't know why that's happening, but it's happening. And I'm one of the real life examples of that. I couldn't tell you why. I just, I've for some reason loved her music and it's really resonated with me. So let me know in the comments what your favorite Ella Langley song is. Mine is Strangers. And also let me know in the comments what other artists you want me to dive into their marketing moments. If you want me to talk about movies, shows, whatever it might be, let me know in the comments. And thank you guys so much for watching. I will see you in the next video.