By Neil McCormick

Copyright independent

The lack of a summer smash is a sign of the fragmentation of pop culture as a result of streaming. We just aren’t listening to the same songs any more, which means fewer hits.

Chartmetric suggests that less than half of 2025’s top 50 songs actually came out this year – most are recycled from previous years.

But cometh the hour, cometh the band. If there was one thing that united pop culture in 2025, it was Oasis, with the pair of battling Mancunian brothers filling stadiums with rousing singalongs of Wonderwall.

It doesn’t seem a leap to suggest that more people have sung along to Wonderwall this year than any other song. That’s because it is a truly great song; a devotional anthem that lifts the spirits yet retains a mysterious ache in its heart, even 30 years on from its release.

Oasis albums have spent 15 weeks in the UK top 10 this year (Taylor Swift only managed five). In July, compilation album Time Flies returned to number one, 15 years after its release, and three Oasis singles were back in the top 20.

Since the duo’s reunion kicked off in April, they have gone from around 24 million monthly listeners on Spotify to 32 million. Wonderwall has been their biggest song, with over 2.5 billion streams.

Wonderwall was built to last, and I am not sure you could say the same of 2025’s other big hits: the dreary Alex Warren ballad Ordinary, which sounds like an Americanised Ed Sheeran wedding song shot up with steroids, or the gimmicky Golden by fictional cartoon band Huntr/x from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters.

TikTok’s candidate for Song of the Summer 2025 is another oldie: Jess Glynne’s Hold My Hand, a minor dance hit that came out in 2015. That’s because a clip from the song was used more than nine million times to soundtrack funny videos of holiday mishaps.

Its impact on the wider world was negligible, however. Another worrying trend for the music business is that young fans appear satisfied listening to 30-second clips without ever investigating the whole song.

This only makes robust oldies like Wonderwall even more valuable.

I don’t expect it to be the last we hear from Oasis. Having been dragged somewhat reluctantly into a reunion with a sibling he exchanged insults with for decades, Noel seems to have had a conversion.

“I love the geezer,” he recently gushed about Liam.

That is the power of music… and money. Noel and Liam are estimated to be earning over £50m (€57.3m) each from these shows, and there are indications the tour will resume next year, possibly returning to Knebworth for a 30th anniversary celebration of their famous 1996 shows.

At this rate, don’t bet against Wonderwall being the song of next summer, too.