Most hits blow up fast. “Lose Controlˮ didnʼt. It climbed for months, starting slow, then growing louder and bigger until it reached peak attention and refused to leave. It kept stacking listens and exposure, staying in rotation long after most songs would have faded. By the time it finally dropped off the Billboard Hot 100 in late 2025, “Lose Controlˮ had become a rare case: a blueprint for longevity built on sustained momentum, not a single viral moment.
How does sustained, consistent promotion create a hit over time?
In this article, I map how repeated visibility moments and release strategy helped “Lose Controlˮ keep growing long after launch week.
Teddy Swims kicked off the Iʼve Tried Everything But Therapy cycle with “What More Can I Sayˮ on May 5, 2023. At the time, he had growing visibility, but no breakout hit. Seven weeks later, he released “Lose Controlˮ (June 23, 2023), a record-setting song that would go on to make chart history, including becoming the first track to reach 100 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.
Built on a high-emotion vocal performance and a chorus engineered for repeat listens, “Lose Controlˮ captures the spiral of missing someone you canʼt stop thinking about. Compared to Teddy Swimsʼ other releases, it shows exceptional growth when you benchmark the cumulative Spotify streams in the first 500 days after release against three of his other major tracks: “The Door,ˮ “Funeral,ˮ and “Bad Dreamsˮ, the last of which arrived after heʼd already crossed 40 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Figure 1. Daily Cumulative Spotify Streams in the First 500 Days: “Lose Controlˮ vs Other Teddy Swims Singles.
Since this is a story about momentum and strategy, the best way to read “Lose Controlˮ isnʼt as a single breakout, but as a sequence of stacked moments, actions, and decisions that compounded attention over time. To make that pattern clear, Iʼll break the story into three types of events that tend to increase reach: strategic interventions, reach multipliers, and public proof points.
1. Strategic Interventions
Strategic interventions are the intentional moves behind the scenes that increase a songʼs chances of being heard again. In the specific case of Teddy Swims and “Lose Control,ˮ the strategy centered on a clear, consistent release line over a little more than two years across the full “Iʼve Tried Everything But Therapyˮ cycle, supported by multiple versions of the same song to keep it re-entering conversation.
Figure 2. Stacked Releases Lift “Lose Controlˮ to No. 1.
As the chart shows, Teddy Swims didnʼt rely on one sudden viral spike, he kept lifting the trackʼs steady streaming floor through a sequence of release “touchpoints.ˮ The first noticeable lift lines up with the rollout of Iʼve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1) and its Part 1.5 iteration, which helped move “Lose Controlˮ out of its early plateau and into a consistent climb. On January 19, 2024, he added a third package, (Part 1) +Live, creating a fresh moment for the project while weekly streams continued to rise.
On February 29, 2024, the campaign shifted into versioning with Lose Control (Alt. Versions), a 12-track bundle of alternate takes designed for different listening contexts and playlists, including the Tiësto remix. Less than three weeks later, on March 19, 2024, that remix was re-issued again as its own dedicated release, paired with an extended version. Together, the three album editions and the versions strategy create a clear pattern in the curve: weekly streams step up in stages, building enough momentum for “Lose Controlˮ to peak and reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 30, 2024, after a 32-week climb from its chart debut (Billboard).
Teddy Swims didnʼt let the momentum cool off. He kept the album cycle moving with new music, and on January 24, 2025 he released Iʼve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2), which later earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Album. That steady cadence helped keep “Lose Controlˮ in the conversation even as it continued aging on the charts. The cycle eventually culminated in Iʼve Tried Everything But Therapy (Complete Edition), a 32-track release that packaged the full story in one place: six new songs, the entirety of Part 2 and Part 1, and three of the four exclusive tracks from Part 1.5. With the campaign still creating momentum, on July 26, 2025, “Lose Controlˮ became the first song in Billboard Hot 100 history to spend triple-digit weeks on the chart (Billboard).
Figure 3. Streams vs Views: “Lose Controlˮ to No. 1.
2. Reach Multipliers
Reach multipliers are the high-visibility moments that can expand a songʼs audience overnight. These include broadcast performances, major award shows, and other mass-distribution touchpoints. In the case of Teddy Swims and “Lose Control,ˮ reach multipliers are the timeline spikes that helped turn steady momentum into mainstream awareness, reinforcing the campaign between releases and keeping the song circulating long after launch.
During the "I've Tried Everything But Therapy" cycle, Teddy Swims had key appearances across TV, YouTube channels, and awards, expanding the audience for “Lose Control.ˮ In 2023, the year the track and Part 1 launched, three moments stand out. First was his TIDAL Sessions appearance in October, where he was spotlighted as a TIDAL 2023 Artist to Watch. Then, in November, he performed “Lose Controlˮ on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Finally, in December, he appeared on The Kelly Clarkson Show, returning to the song again, this time in a duet with Kelly Clarkson.
Figure 4. Key Appearances That Fueled “Lose Controlˮʼs Early Rise.
But his most important appearances, between the song reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 2024 and breaking the record for most weeks in the Top 10 in April 2025, were likely the ones that helped keep it relevant throughout that entire stretch. And itʼs probably no coincidence that he performed “Lose Controlˮ in most of them.
Figure 5. Table of Appearances in that period.
Out of all these appearances, I want to focus on one in particular: the Grammys. Teddy Swims was nominated for Best New Artist at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards, which gave him the opportunity to perform “Lose Controlˮ on the CBS broadcast. The telecast was watched by an estimated 15.4 million viewers (Yahoo! Finance), and that kind of exposure can create a jump in curiosity, driving people to search for the artist and revisit the song.
Figure 6. Teddy Swims Discovery Lift Around the Grammys.
3. Public Proof Points
Public proof points are the visible milestones that signal a songʼs momentum. They include chart peaks and record-setting runs that turn performance into a narrative people repeat. And until the next record-breaker arrives, those milestones keep the story alive.
Figure 7. Days Between Key Milestones: “Lose Controlˮ.
“Lose Controlˮ first entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 26, 2023, about two months after release. From there, it took 32 weeks to reach No. 1, a slow climb that became part of the story.
In April 2025, the song broke the all-time record for most weeks spent in the Hot 100ʼs top 10, surpassing The Weekndʼs Blinding Lights with 58 weeks. Then, on July 26, 2025, it became the first track ever to hit 100 weeks on the chart.
Finally, the song left the Hot 100 on October 25, 2025 after a record 112 weeks, following Billboardʼs updated recurrent rules. That exit didnʼt end the story: Guinness World Records recognizes “Lose Controlˮ as the record-holder for most cumulative weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 (one single), at 112 weeks (Guinness World Records).
So, how does sustained, consistent promotion create a hit over time? “Lose Controlˮ suggests the answer isnʼt one defining moment, itʼs long-term planning plus smart momentum management.
Teddy Swimsʼ rollout reads like a multi-year strategy: from May 2023, when the first single of the Iʼve Tried Everything But Therapy cycle was released, through the 32-track Complete Edition in June 2025, the campaign kept creating fresh reasons for audiences to re-engage. That planning shows up not only in the release schedule and naming logic of the album editions, but also in the cohesive creative world, consistent visual language across artwork, videos, and branding, and in the discipline of repeatedly putting “Lose Controlˮ in front of high-reach audiences.
In marketing terms, the campaign balanced always-on presence through steady releases and continuity, with big visibility moments like major broadcasts and award stages, and then stacked attention by activating around moments when the spotlight was already present. The result is what the data makes clear: not a single spike that made the record, but a sequence of touchpoints that reinforced the narrative long enough for the song to become historic.
For other artists, the takeaway is practical: donʼt rush the story. Plan further ahead than release week, commit to consistent baseline activity, and be ready to adapt within that plan when something starts working. Hits like “Lose Controlˮ arenʼt only launched, theyʼre built, by treating attention as an always-on effort and by designing a campaign that keeps earning new moments over time.
Lose Control
| Title: | Lose Control |
|---|---|
| Artist: | Teddy Swims |
| Release date: | June 23, 2023 |
| Record label: | Warner Records |
| Duration: | 331 |
| ISRC | USWB12302315 |
| ISWC | T3188208820 |
| Copyright © and Phonographic copyright ℗: | SWIMS Int. |
| Licensed to: | Warner Records Inc. |
Writers
| Writer | IPI | ISNI | Current affiliation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Julian Collin Bunetta | 00633673930 | 0000 0003 7258 540X | BMI |
| Jaten Collin Dimsdale (Teddy Swims) | 00883231529 | 0000 0005 0346 3876 | BMI |
| John Stephen Sudduth (Mikky Ekko) | 00568573993 | 0000 0003 9108 1071 | BMI |
| Joshua Emanuel Coleman | 00548618616 | 0000 0004 0737 3168 | ASCAP |
| Marco Antonio Rodriguez-Diaz Jr. | 00468537120 | BMI |
⇲ Methodology, data curation, and limitations
Methodology
This analysis combines public milestones (charts, awards/TV appearances, and major release moments) with platform indicators of audience demand and consumption.
Spotify stream figures were sourced from Chartmetric and reflect the main, original version of the song (the first released track), excluding streams from alternate versions or other variants. The data was used in two main ways: (1) cumulative streams built from daily stream counts, and (2) Average Weekly Spotify Streams, calculated by grouping daily data into weeks (each week labeled by its first day) and averaging the daily values within each week to reduce day-to-day volatility.
Public-demand indicators (Google Trends Searches and Wikipedia Page Views) were also downloaded from Chartmetric and aligned by calendar date without averaging.
Data curation and cleaning
To avoid misleading trend shapes caused by reporting artifacts, several quality filters were applied before aggregation:
Missing/blank values were removed:
- A zero-data window appeared in the Chartmetric daily Spotify stream export for “Lose Controlˮ from Jun 23, 2023 to Sept 17, 2023; this was treated as a tracking artifact and excluded from averaged views where it would distort the early trend.
- Extreme one-day spikes (daily values above 6,000,000 streams) were excluded when they appeared as isolated outliers (often immediately following a recorded “0ˮ day), consistent with a reporting anomaly.
- Where relevant, duplicate rows and non-informative blanks were removed when statistically insignificant.
Limitations and disclaimers
- Dashboard data can change. Streaming and demand platforms may update historical values due to backfills, methodology updates, fraud/spam removals, or track mapping changes. Results reflect the data available at the time of export and preparation.
- Different versions can map differently. Singles, album versions, remixes, and alternate versions may exist as separate Spotify track objects.
- Weekly averaging reveals trends, not peaks. “Average Weekly Spotify Streamsˮ is designed to show the underlying trajectory.
- Search/Wikipedia ≠ listening. Google searches and Wikipedia page views are best interpreted as curiosity and intent to learn, not direct proxies for streams.
- Billboard dates are chart weeks. Billboard Hot 100 milestones are referenced by the chartʼs official “datedˮ week, which may not match the exact broadcast or announcement day.
Overall, this is a structured snapshot of how a hit can be built through compounding visibility and repeat entry points. The charts and milestones should be read as directional evidence of momentum over time, not a perfect representation of all listening behavior across every platform.
AI Disclaimer
English is not my first language, so I acknowledge the use of ‘ChatGPTʼ as a tool to help review and improve my writing and grammar during the final stage of this article. I used the prompt “Suggest ways to improve the following textˮ and reviewed the feedback provided by ‘ChatGPTʼ. Based on this, I revised the writing using my own expressions.