‘Best Song Ever’: The strange way a One Direction hit eerily foreshadowed modern music consumption
If we’re to look at acts who have developed an active fanbase that worships their every move, there aren’t many who can claim to have more dedicated supporters than One Direction.
Of course, fandom can refer to a strong emotional connection that one feels with the artistry of an individual or group, and this can be applied to many different acts from all different genres who have fans that will devote themselves to cheering on their personal favourites. However, this can mutate into ‘stan culture’, whereby people will blindly follow and worship every move of a particular artist, and this is where outrageous claims begin to be made.
Those who engage in being a ‘stan’ will go to the extreme to protect the integrity of their favourite artists. They’ll regularly put them on a pedestal by likening them to monarchs, deities and celestial bodies beyond human grasp, and will spout incoherent essays of abuse at anyone who disagrees with them. Getting on the wrong side of someone who identifies as a stan is a dangerous activity, and even hinting at the fact that I’m writing about One Direction has surely solicited responses from some readers along the lines of “you’d better not be talking shit about my boys”.
It’s a truly fascinating world which I don’t think I’ll ever understand, but it begs the question of how far has the wool been pulled over your eyes, and are you prepared to stop and think about how these artists have genuinely reshaped the musical landscape?
Other than taking control of a certain generation and effectively brainwashing them into buying their records, making them the world’s biggest boy band since the likes of the Backstreet Boys or Westlife, what have One Direction done that has dramatically altered the course of music, how we consume it, and how it is carefully marketed to its audience?
With the release of their 2013 single, ‘Best Song Ever’, they didn’t demolish every other song ever written by proclaiming their own superiority, but they did, whether knowingly or not, foresee how music would be listened to, and how technology would advance in such a way that their song would live on in infamy. It has nothing to do with the song itself—its earworm of a hook—or the super-saccharine delivery of it that almost exclusively appeals to teenyboppers, but instead, it’s to do with the tongue-in-cheek name that they gave the song.
At the end of the 2010s, music business journalist Eamonn Forde asserted that One Direction had somehow managed to peer into their shared crystal ball and notice that within a few short years, voice-activated technologies would become a massive part of our daily lives. With the emergence of home assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home device, rather than select songs on streaming services by using the outdated method of typing in the name of the track you want to hear, you could effectively snap your fingers at a small robot and demand them to find it for you, like a lord to a serf.
For those who weren’t sure what they wanted to listen to at any given moment, a common prompt was for people to instruct their electronic Jeeves to find them ‘the best song ever’, and due to the way it is programmed to respond to key words, it would make the assumption that the ‘best song ever’ had to be labelled as such. As a result, ‘Best Song Ever’ became the default ‘best song ever’ when requested using virtual assistants, and One Direction’s stock saw an increase once again as a result.
In an article for BBC in 2019, Forde summed up how record companies were ready to pounce on this potential development as early as 2013, stating: “The next big recruitment drive at record companies will be around voice experts who can advise on how songs are created and promoted, all the way from the recording studio to the marketing teams, so as to perform best in a voice-based music world.”
Later on, he would call ‘Best Song Ever’ “powerfully prescient”, and “an eerie foreshadowing of what will happen”.
Anyone who keeps a close eye on technological advancements or spends too much time fretting over the accuracy of dystopian fiction would have been able to tell you that we would pivot away from text-based communication and into a world of voice-activated prompts and AI-powered automation, but what One Direction seemed to do with this song was unwitting find a way to exploit the flaws in these advancements. By making the simple decision to name the song ‘Best Song Ever’, anyone too lazy to research what the actual best song ever is would get exactly what they asked for.
But anyway, for the record, is ‘Best Song Ever’ the best song ever? Uhhh, yeah, of course it is…
