Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’ Highlights the New Way Music is Made
Since its release in April, Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso has emerged as the unavoidable soundtrack to swimsuit season, complete with a concert shout-out from Adele and a music video filmed at the beach.
Its success has pushed Carpenter to No. 18 on Bloomberg’s Pop Star Power Ranking with more than 434 million streams on Spotify, and an accompanying music video that has been watched more than 43 million times on YouTube.
“Like any great dance song, with Espresso, the first sip tastes like a nutritionless, whipped topping when it is, in fact, an immaculately produced pop song,” said Charlie Harding, an adjunct music professor at New York University.
The song epitomizes an increasingly prominent aspect of the music industry – one of the song’s most recognizable loops is a sample that anyone can download for as low as $12.99.
The loop comes from Vaughn Oliver, a DJ whose sample packs are among the most popular on Splice, a platform that offers samples and plug-ins for musicians to use in their songs royalty-free in exchange for a monthly subscription fee.
“We don’t necessarily track the use of samples in major chart records, but we see them everywhere and kind of endlessly,” said Jay Pulman, the creative director at Splice, who is known professionally as Capsun. “Our users are really those top industry producers all the way through people who are just starting out.”
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Elsewhere, Splice-sourced samples have appeared prominently in Doja Cat’s Say So and Justin Bieber’s Running Over.
Since releasing Espresso as a single, Carpenter has followed up with an EP featuring the track in various forms. The “Double Shot” version is, of course, sped up while the “Decaf” version is slowed down. She has also put out a couple of official remixes from producer Mark Ronson, who oversaw the creation of the Barbie soundtrack, itself a phenomenon.
On stage, Carpenter likes to ad-lib during songs, subbing in topical lyrics for the amusement of her live audiences. At Coachella, she referenced a memorable scene from Saltburn, the 2023 psychological thriller starring her boyfriend Barry Keoghan. On YouTube, a video of her performing Espresso has generated over 5 million views.
The track is hardly the only contender for song of the summer that reflects the changing nature of music creation.
Earlier this month, DJs from around the world took a song idea from Megan Boni, a TikTok creator who goes by the handle Girl On Couch, and created a club hit out of her laconic riff about dating men in finance. Boni has since signed a record deal with Universal Music Group NV.
Another song, BBL Drizzy, written by comedian King Willonius, went viral during the high-profile battle between rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Willonius wrote the comedic lyrics to the song and then used AI to render it as a soul track.
As the summer of 2024 heats up, the path to global earworm status has never felt less predictable.