Spotify US Most-Streamed Song of 2023 – Espresso

Lore & Background

By the time Espresso dropped in the spring of 2023, Sabrina Carpenter had already spent years building a devoted fanbase through her acting work and earlier music releases. But nothing prepared the world for the specific, magnetic energy of this track. The song positions its narrator as the essential, irreplaceable spark in someone's day—the espresso shot that makes everything else taste like water. That self-assured, almost cocky framing resonated with a generation of listeners who were hungry for pop that felt both fun and unapologetically self-possessed.

The production leans into a bouncy, retro-inflected pop sound with a driving rhythm that made the track feel almost physical, like a dance you could do in a kitchen at 2 a.m. Carpenter's vocal performance balances playful sing-song phrasing with moments of genuine power, and the song's structure—built around a hook that burrows into your brain within two listens—made it a streaming juggernaut. Fans on social media created entire discourse threads around the coffee metaphor, debating whether the narrator was the espresso, the coffee, or the sugar, and the song became a shared cultural shorthand for that specific feeling of being someone's favorite thing.

The Spotify US Most-Streamed Song of 2023 title was less a surprise to those who had been following Carpenter's trajectory and more a confirmation. It signaled that her pop instincts were not just commercially viable but genuinely, statistically dominant. For a former child actress stepping fully into the pop mainstream, the award was a milestone that reframed how the industry and the public perceived her: not as a crossover curiosity, but as a force that could own a year's worth of listening.

In Their Own Story

The studio was warm that afternoon, the kind of late-spring heat that makes the air feel thick and golden. Sabrina sat cross-legged on the leather couch, a cold coffee untouched beside her, while the engineer ran the track one more time from the top. The first beat hit and she closed her eyes, letting the rhythm rattle through her ribs. When the hook came around for the third time, she was mouthing the words without thinking, head bobbing, a grin she couldn't suppress spreading across her face. The engineer paused the playback. "You hear it, right?" she asked, not really needing an answer. Outside, the city hummed with summer already pressing against the glass. She knew, with the quiet certainty of someone who has been waiting a long time, that this one was going to be different. Not just another single. A whole year's worth of people, in their cars and their kitchens and their late-night playlists, choosing her voice over everything else.

Reader's Guide

Spotify US Most-Streamed Song of 2023, awarded for "Espresso." Sabrina Carpenter won.

Okay, picture this: it's the end of 2023, and the streaming numbers are in. You've watched Sabrina go from the Disney Channel set to the center of the pop conversation in the space of a couple of years, and then this one song just… takes over. Every playlist, every car ride, every "what should I listen to" group chat. And when Spotify officially hands her the title of the most-streamed song in the US for the entire year, it's not just a stat on a screen.

Fans were already treating it like a coronation in real time. TikTok was flooded with kitchen-dance edits, coffee-shop skits, the whole "I'm the espresso" discourse running wild. The win felt less like an industry award and more like a collective exhale from millions of people who had been on repeat since May.

For Carpenter's trajectory, it was the moment the needle fully shifted. She wasn't the actress who sings anymore. She was the pop artist whose name defined a year's worth of listening. And everyone who'd been watching since the early days got to say, "I was there when it clicked."

Did You Know?

• Espresso was released as a standalone single in 2023 before being included on Sabrina Carpenter's 2024 album Short n' Sweet, giving it a full year of streaming momentum before the album cycle.
• The song's central metaphor—being someone's essential 'espresso'—sparked a massive, ongoing fan discourse online about whether the narrator is the coffee, the espresso shot, or the sugar, with no single 'correct' answer.
• Carpenter's path to this streaming milestone included years as a Disney Channel actress, making the 2023 pop breakthrough a particularly dramatic pivot in her public career.
• The track's bouncy, retro-flavored production and kitchen-dance energy made it a perennial favorite in social-media video formats, where fans choreographed and lip-synced to it across platforms throughout the summer of 2