It's Time for Billboard to Revamp its Hot 100
Why do I still look at Billboard Magazine’s Hot 100 list every week? It’s turned into a boring joke. Songs remain at number one regularly for more than a dozen weeks. Songs stay on the charts for sometimes one to two years. Whenever a current major artist (Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, etc.) has a new album out their songs take over the chart for a week or two. People start declaring things like “no artist has ever had this many songs at one time in the Hot 100!” The fact is, how Billboard does its weekly rankings is far different from the old days – when I first fell in love with the Hot 100.
I probably became aware of Billboard back in the 1970s when Casey Kasem’s weekly “American Top 40” show aired on the radio. Forced into going to church with my family, I’d put my tape recorder next to a speaker and hope to get about 45 minutes’ worth of the show to listen to when I got home. Back then one could count on a few songs to debut in the Top 40 every week – rarely higher than number 30. Songs would slowly rise up the chart - most famously Hot’s Angel in Your Arms and Paul Davis’s I Go Crazy which took an extremely slow boat to the Top Ten with major fanfare by Casey and chart watchers like me. Songs would stay at number one for a week or two, or four. It was a huge deal when Debby Boone’s You Light Up My Life spent 10 weeks at number one in 1977.
The song was everywhere, including at an assembly in my high school where everyone sang the smash! Today, I couldn’t tell you anything about the words or music to the current Kendrick Lamar/SZA song Luther which has so far spent 11 weeks at number one.
Okay, so you may be thinking, “what does this old guy know about music today?” True. I know very few of the songs on the Hot 100 these days. However, after 40 years I still keep a weekly list of my Top Ten favorite new(ish) songs each week. Somewhere around the early 1990s, which just happened to coincide with Billboard’s then new approach to ranking songs according to Soundscan, I began to veer off in my own musical direction. This was the decade of alternative rock and I listened to a lot of it. Some might be amazed to know that major alt rock artists of that period had few if any Top 40 hits, including as Nirvana, Tori Amos, Dave Matthews Band, Matthew Sweet, and Pearl Jam. Yet, we think of these artists as defining the sound of that era. Some of this had to do with the Hot 100 not including songs that weren’t officially released as “singles.” You’d have to view charts such as “Adult Alternative Airplay” to see the artists’ slightly more accurate rate of popularity.
Then in the 21st Century streaming took over. Now any song that gets streamed a lot stays on the Hot 100 for a seemingly infinite number of weeks. Does this reflect a new kind of popularity for music? No. People listen to most of their music via streaming platforms. Prior to this they’d either hear their favorite songs on the radio or listen to their CDs, cassettes, or vinyl. No one was tracking how many times I listened to Madonna’s Express Yourself. (Trust me, it was a LOT in 1989.) So how can we possibly compare the Hot 100 today to what it was back in the first 50 years of rock?
Case in point, there are numerous songs on this week’s Hot 100 that have been on the chart for more 26 weeks, or a half year. These include: A Bar Song (Tipsy) by Shaboozey (55 weeks on the chart), Pink Pony Club by Chappel Roan (46 weeks), Lose Control by Teddy Swims (89 weeks, Benson Boone’s Beautiful Things (66 weeks), and Die with a Smile by Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars (37 weeks) and these are ALL STILL IN THE TOP TEN! Now, really?! Does this accurately reflect the current most popular songs in the country? Are radio stations still playing these songs that much? I don’t listen to Top 40 radio so you’ll have to answer that. I don’t get it. Even the most popular songs from any era before this would never have lasted this long in the Top Ten. At 89 weeks, Lose Control is actually moving UP! A Bar Song (Tipsy) currently has a star with a circle around it. Wasn’t this the song of last summer and fall?
The other big problem with this is that it keeps new artists from making a dent on the charts today (unless they have a major number of TikTok followers.) It’s time for Billboard to change this system and maybe give a song not more than six months on the Hot 100 (even that seems generous.) They used to this with both songs and albums. Why not bring back the concept of “catalog” songs? After six months, a song could move over to a related chart where they can live in infamy with Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
Come on Billboard! Give new songs and artists more of a chance to grow and find an audience.
On a related note, both Lizzo and Miley Cyrus won Record of the Year Grammys within the last few years. Yet, Lizzo’s latest song Still Bad hasn’t even cracked the Hot 100. Did she really piss people off in the intervening years? There’s no question that the song is right up the same alley as the one that won her that Grammy. Cyrus won in 2024 for the LONG running Hot 100 hit Flowers. Her first major single, End of the World, from her upcoming album has so far peaked at number 52. This week it is all the way down to number 93. Really?! Are people not willing to give it half the Flowers chance?
I don’t know what’s happening. These are decent songs that can’t even make the Top 40 yet Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, Post Malone & Morgan Wallen’s I Had Some Help, Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us and The Weeknd & Playboi Carti’s Timeless are still hanging out in the Top 40 after more than 30 weeks each. It’s just not right.
This is why I still do my own weekly Top Ten and I still search for new music. The charts are stale and rarely tell or offer us anything new. Billboard, please! Give someone else a chance and help artists and listeners find all of the great current music that exists out there!
What do you think? Is Billboard getting it right or wrong? How should they revamp their Hot 100? Were you a chart watcher? What do you think about some of the songs I’ve mentioned? I’d love to hear from you!
My 2025 playlist is here!
There's a lot wrong with the Billboard charts these days, though it does sometimes feel like an "old man yells at cloud" situation. Heck, even after Casey ended his first run on AT40, they stopped using Billboard exclusively, choosing instead to gather data from other sources that more accurately reflected the mass market.
Truth is there's no real good single formula to track popularity, because there's so much fragmentation in how people listen and, oddly at the same time, radio has become so homogenized and milquetoast in its offerings that the same 40 songs are literally played everywhere at the same time at the same cadence.
I don't know that it'll ever be as reasonably clear cut as it was, though you could argue that the "old days" were bad, too, using unreliable data like record store phone calls. Because record companies didn't release commercial singles as often in the '90s, many songs that should have been #1 hits didn't even chart (think "Don't Speak" by No Doubt, among others).
As a chart fanatic, I appreciate this line of questioning! Well written piece, as always!
It’s not just the Billboard Hot 100, Dan, charts everywhere have lost much of their relevance and are struggling to adapt to the realities of the streaming era. Record labels now receive an enormous amount of data directly from DSPs, so they no longer rely on charts to tell them whether a song or artist is performing well.
As for the issue of one artist dominating the chart with multiple tracks, there’s actually a straightforward solution, one that Billboard itself pioneered. In the late ’70s, when they first introduced their dance charts, they faced a similar challenge: disco albums often had multiple tracks being played in clubs. Instead of charting them individually, they grouped the tracks together.
For some reason, that approach was abandoned by the end of the decade. But this would be an ideal time to bring it back. And to avoid the complexity of combining streams from multiple tracks, you simply count the streams of the most popular song, essentially treating it as the single.