Addison Rae and the Marketplace for Greatness

On best-of lists, attention disparities, and the imperfect pursuit of the Perfect Pop Album

We’ve long since rounded the corner into January, but I still find myself thinking about the best-of lists published at the end of last year. Specifically, I’m stuck on how many of those lists featured Addison, the debut album by TikTok star-turned-pop savant Addison Rae. Something has been needling me about this album’s inclusion, something that’s a bit more nuanced than typical gripes. Nuanced enough to inspire an entire essay, which it seems prudent to publish now, before this newsletter’s circulation is big enough to rankle any Rae fans that might disagree with it.¹

However, if you’re a Rae hater here for an Addison takedown, I’m sorry to say that this isn’t it. I like Rae’s debut. I think “Diet Pepsi” is overrated, but the album as a whole is immaculate, and the Alfa Mist-style keys on “Times Like These” get me every fucking time. So if you are a Rae fan reading this just to determine how quickly you should doxx me, let me first say that this is not meant to be a criticism of Addison, but rather a reflection of what Addison’s critical success says about some of the cracks in the music landscape in 2025. An album can be great and still augur not-so-great things.

“Money Is Everything”

First, let’s take a minute to reflect on the concept of end-of-year best-of lists in general. The idea behind these lists is simple: a bunch of people (or publications) with great music taste and plentiful free time listen to a ton of albums released in a given year, then pick out the albums that they consider the best. This whole enterprise implies a meritocratic system whereby all artists (and listeners) have equal access to a shared “marketplace” that allows the very best music to rise to the p. At this point, I’m not sure if anyone truly believes this system is completely meritocratic, but its myth underpins the validity of every best-of list ever published.²

Addison appeared on a number of those lists last year, even topping a few of them. Several lists cited the album’s inventiveness, although often without much elaboration outside of attaching the term “trip-hop” to the closing track “Headphones On.”³ A few of them lauded a certain vulnerability in the lyrics, usually referencing a line about familial strife on the same song. And of course, many highlighted how undeniably fun the album is, a quality that, in a year as existentially brutal as 2025, should not be taken for granted.

But by and large, much of the praise for Addison focused on the album as a sort of a masterclass in pop perfection, its value drawing more from its meticulous construction than its artistic or emotional rawness. To the extent that it’s inventive, it’s inventing within the confines of an established pop superstructure; to the extent that it’s vulnerable, those forays into vulnerability are embellishments on an aesthetic whose first loyalty is to an awe-inducing flawlessness. People who like Addison recognize that this vacuum-sealed polish is sort of the point. As one best-of list summarized, “when the artifice is this good, maybe authenticity is overrated.”

All this is part-and-parcel with poptimism, an approach to assessing music that’s been guiding many of these lists since the mid-2000s. Basically, poptimism recognized that crafting a Perfect Pop Album is actually quite hard, so successful efforts at making great pop music should be critically celebrated. This introduced some welcome nuance into the “rockist” perspective that all pop music is derivative nonsense, and it allowed music critics to engage with releases by major pop artists (and less-major pop artists) on a more serious footing.

One side-effect of this change, however, is that it shifts critic’s attention away from concepts like artistic expression and towards the technical aspects of pop mastery, i.e. a brilliant hook or pristine studio production. Writing good hooks is valuable in any genre, but overweighting these aspects also distances an album’s value from the identity of the artist making it. Artists don’t necessarily need to “put themselves” into their work to make critically lauded pop music—in fact, it often works better if they don’t. Taken to extremes, this approach turns albums into commodities, like cars that can be perfected and sold because their producers know what consumers want and are very good at giving it to them.

Back to Addison: another thing you’ll notice reading about Rae’s album is how many writers take it upon themselves to credit Rae’s producers, the “Scandinavian pop wizards” Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd. The implication is that Addison is a team effort, and that getting the right producers on board was instrumental in helping the record become what it is. None of this is said to discredit Rae’s achievement, and it shouldn’t. Just having the right producers doesn’t make a hit album; an artist still needs the talent to harness those producers’ skills in service of her vision.

But having a great production team clearly helps, and great production teams cost money. As a result, overweighting the value of technical mastery in music also overweights the financial resources that artists have available to them. This is something I don’t think poptimism has fully reckoned with yet, which makes poptimism-based music reviews always feel incomplete to me. If you want to be Marxist about it, you could say that, if you’re treating music as a product, you can’t just look at the music “marketplace” — you need to move your view upstream to the means of production. There’s a lot of capitalist machinery behind the making of a Perfect Pop Album, and that machinery is subject to the same disparities that characterize capitalism as a whole.

All of this makes Addison songs like “Money Is Everything” feel just a little too on the nose. I’m not saying that Rae doesn’t deserve to be on these best-of lists, but it’s kind of jarring to see her album alongside works by Water From Your Eyes and They Are Gutting A Body Of Water, bands that definitely don’t seem like they’re being judged on their proximity to pop’s plastic-wrapped sheen. It’s almost enough to make one pine for the days when rock and pop albums were ranked on separate lists, when you could be more confident that oranges were being compared to other similarly-resourced oranges. Rockism has its excesses, but at least a fetish for lo-fi sounds and DIY culture acts as a counterweight to money’s influence on music. Poptimism, by contrast, exacerbates that influence.

Obviously, money has been putting its thumb on the music world since forever, and it’s not like deep pockets doesn’t help one make a great rock album either. But even if this is no secret, it doesn’t seem to come up in any of the discussions in or around the best-of lists I’ve read, and that absence becomes increasingly relevant the more that we’re explicitly judging albums on things that money can buy. I’m happy for Rae, but I also want music to be primarily rewarded for expressing the messy human experience rather than laying down a slick beat.⁴ To the extent that Addison’s reception represents a trend to the contrary, I’m not sure it’s a good one.

It’s also only one of the trends that Addison highlights. Beyond the money, there’s an additional way that Rae’s rise provides a window into the specific forces shaping music in this decade.

“Fame Is A Gun”

Many pop stars are good at social media, but Rae is unique in the degree to which it played a role in her rise. No other pop artist so clearly exemplifies what several reviewers referred to as the Tiktok-to-popstar pipeline. Before Addison, Rae was already famous for being the fifth-most followed account on TikTok before, building an eight-figure follower base not through musical releases but rather through more TikTok-native content (e.g. viral dances). Long before releasing her debut album (and indeed, even before her first few critically panned singles), Rae had plenty of people’s attention.

There’s some parallels here with other pop singers that have come to music from a different part of the entertainment industry (e.g. Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter). The ugliest side of this coin is the so-called “nepo baby,” a term that always seems to generate a lot of discussion whenever it comes up. In my mind, the definition of a “nepo baby” is the same quality that makes them disliked: artists who, through no effort on their own part, have privileged access to the attention of industry insiders who are disproportionately capable of making or breaking a musician’s career.

Addison Rae, of course, is not a nepo baby. Being a TikTok star takes a shit ton of work and a not insignificant amount of skill, and in that sense the attention she garnered is very much earned. But it’s earned with a set of skills that are fundamentally different from those required to be a great musician. Many people that are just as musically talented as Rae aren’t going to be as savvy at social media, which puts them at a disadvantage in a music industry that rewards qualities unrelated to the ability of a person to make good art.

In other words, in a world where the amount of talented musicians exceeds the amount of time that fans and critics have to listen to music, the limiting factor in an artist’s career is not talent but attention. As a result, access to those fans and critics is tilted towards artists that have the ability to generate more attention, whether via industry connections or a massive social media following. Unless you have famous friends and/or live in LA, the latter option is generally the most accessible, creating a situation where people that just want to make great music feel like they need to build social media brands in order to have that music heard.

In Rae’s case, one could argue the outcome was positive, allowing a talented artist to use her social media hustle as a pathway to realize her artistic vision. But this isn’t an outcome available to everyone, and not just because not everyone is good at TikTok. You probably can’t build a >80m subscriber base just in one country, but as an English-speaking TikTok star making videos in the U.S., most of Rae’s fans are probably located there as well. This also happens to be where most of best-of lists are based,⁵ which means that, to these publications, Rae’s subscribers are more visible (and monetizable) than those of a social media star in Thailand or Argentina.

There are a number of potential Rae’s out there—every word here links to one. I’d love to see what some of these artists could do in the studio with two Max Martin proteges, but many are unlikely to ever have that type of opportunity so simply by dint of their geographic location. These barriers can be overcome, but, if K-pop is any example, doing so at scale seems to require well-capitalized companies willing to throw money at pop stars because they see those artists as investments that will generate shareholder returns. As someone who wants to believe in a musical meritocracy, I don’t think this is the world we want.

Fortunately, it’s also not necessarily the world we have. Before descending too far into the gloom, let me acknowledge that Pitchfork’s top album of 2025 was Los Thuthanaka, which in many ways is the anti-Addison: gnarly, un-condensed, and decidedly non-Western. The system’s not entirely broken, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth paying attention to the places where it can still get gummed up. Old forces (money) and new ones (social media fame) have the potential to shift the music world in undesirable ways, and while Addison might not be an example of this problem at its worst, it could be a canary. The only way you can avoid the cracks is if you know where they are.

1. Who am I kidding? This newsletter’s never going to be big enough to matter to Rae fans. But hey, a man can dream.

2. Even for lists that are upfront about being a reflection of the author’s subjective taste, there’s an assumption that the author was at least aware of all the potential winners and listened to most of them. No one wants to read a year-end article titled “The Best Albums From The Music I Had Downloaded On iPod During My Year In The Woods.”

3. For a longer-form read on how Addison is inventive, this description by The Other Dave Moore is a good start.

4. Although let’s be honest - the best albums often do both, Addison included.

5. Many are also in the UK, which is another English-speaking country with close ties to the U.S.