Why Songs On Shows Like ‘Off-Campus’ Are Streaming — And Climbing the Charts — Like Never Before
Categoria: Musica
The new path to a viral hit? For songs new and old, it's landing a placement on one of TV's current soapy sensations.
Por Billboard | 16/07/2026
When Amanda Krieg Thomas was a teenager growing up in Weston, Connecticut, she — like many of her peers — spent her school nights burning perfectly curated mix CDs. But rather than focusing on favorite genres, artists or specific moods, Krieg Thomas’ CDs had a different theme: music from (and inspired by) her favorite TV shows. “ The OC , Roswell , Buffy the Vampire Slayer , I loved them all,” she gushes. Teen-oriented TV was in the midst of a heyday during Krieg Thomas’ young adulthood in the early aughts, as networks like The WB (which later merged with UPN to become The CW) and ABC Family (later rebranded to Freeform) zeroed in on young not-quite-adults and perfected a formula they couldn’t resist — usually involving love triangles, a social outcast landing the cool kid and, as Krieg Thomas astutely noticed, music central to the storyline. Popular shows of the day like those Krieg Thomas loved, plus hits such as Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill , eschewed traditional scores for pop music soundtracking key moments, catapulting songs like The Fray’s “How To Save a Life” and Gavin DeGraw’s “I Don’t Want To Be” to mass audiences in the process. Related How Big a Streaming Bump Is ‘Off Campus’ Giving Elton John, Audrey Hobert and Dozens More Classic Rock & Alt-Pop Soundtrack Favorites? Phoebe Bridgers Presents Back-to-Back Versions of 'Lost Boys' For Late-Night TV: Watch Extra Time: These Spain and Argentina World Cup Jerseys Will Arrive Before the Big Game Fast forward to 2026 and a lot has changed. Krieg Thomas, 41, is now a successful music supervisor with her own company, Yay Team, where she and her colleagues find and license the perfect songs to score films and TV shows. Streaming video on demand has largely replaced cable, flooding the marketplace with shows and enabling instant, global viewership. Meanwhile, the music industry has shifted to an all-you-can-eat streaming model of its own. But it’s clear that, once again, TV aimed at adolescent and young adult audiences with an appetite for melodrama is experiencing a renaissance — and this time, it’s breaking the accompanying songs to far bigger heights. Placements on recent streaming phenomena like Amazon Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty and Netflix’s Wednesday and Stranger Things , as well as HBO’s Euphoria , are launching decades-old songs like Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” and The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” to unforeseen chart peaks. And this year, Krieg Thomas, along with her co-music supervisor, Anna Romanoff, soundtracked one of TV’s biggest new hits: Amazon Prime’s Off Campus . The duo’s onscreen song picks have been career-changing for newer acts like G Flip, The Beaches and Remi Wolf in the weeks since the show premiered in March, with its songs’ official on-demand U.S. streams increasing by as much as 46,000% from the week before episodes aired to a month after, according to Luminate. Off Campus , based on