Who Can Save Pop Music?
The Sam Sanders Show
KCRW & Sam Sanders
4.9 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Even though 2025 gave us big albums from artists like Lady Gaga and Bad Bunny, did pop music fall short overall?
Sam breaks down the year’s hits and misses with Reanna Cruz, music journalist and producer at Switched on Pop. Why does everything sound like it’s stuck in the 2000s? Who are the artists actually pushing boundaries? And is there anything to look forward to in the new year?
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NOTE: The Sam Sanders team is taking a short break for the holidays. We’ll be back with a new episode January 2.
The Sam Sanders Show is a production of KCRW and Sam Sanders Productions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey listeners, it is the season of giving. |
| 0:03.0 | Get that warm, fuzzy feeling. |
| 0:05.1 | Make a donation, pick out some cozy KCRW merch, or send meals to local food banks. |
| 0:11.1 | Donate now at kCRW.com slash give. |
| 0:15.2 | Hey y'all, Sam here. |
| 0:16.2 | Thank you so much for checking out my show. |
| 0:18.1 | I want to start this episode by playing a song that all of you, |
| 0:22.8 | and I mean all of you, have heard before. |
| 0:42.3 | That's a little ditty called Die with a Smile With a Smile, sung by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga, two of the biggest pop stars in the world. |
| 0:48.3 | And die with the smile. |
| 0:52.3 | If the world was ending, I'd want to be next to you. |
| 0:55.0 | It was announced earlier this month that Die with a Smile hit a big achievement in 2025. |
| 1:05.0 | Billboard magazine, The Authority on what's popular in pop music, they crowned Die with a Smile as the number one hit on their year end Hot 100 chart. |
| 1:18.5 | Biggest song of the year, basically. But what's crazy is that Die with a Smile was released not in 2025, but in August of 2024. Y'all, this song is old. This sums up most of my |
| 1:34.0 | big feelings on pop in 2025. A lot of it felt old, overplayed, redundant, not new. But I wanted to gut check myself on this, make sure I wasn't just |
| 1:46.8 | being too much of a negative Nancy. So I called up one of my favorite music journalists to talk it all |
| 1:51.8 | out. Their name is Rihanna Cruz. Rihanna produces and sometimes hosts the very, very good |
| 1:58.6 | music podcast switched on pop. Rihanna told me, yes, the theme of this year in pop may have been reheated nachos, as the kids say. But still, there was some really good stuff worth celebrating. All right, here's our chat. Enjoy. |
| 2:14.9 | Rihanna Cruz, welcome to the show. |
| 2:18.1 | You're one of my favorite music journalists. |
| 2:19.8 | It's so great to have you here. |
| 2:21.0 | And I love this kind of chat because it manifested out of a conversation you and I had in the real world. |
... |
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