For the first time in 35 years, the Billboard Top 40 has no hip-hop or rap songs. Here’s why

[NinaFromCanadaEh]

https://globalnews.ca/news/11514231/for ... heres-why/

By Alan Cross Global News
Posted November 9, 2025 7:00 am
Starting in the late ’70s, hip-hop and rap ascended through popular culture, mostly in America but also in other countries.



Then, in 1990, a breakthrough. Hip-hop and rap tracks began infiltrating the Billboard Top 40, and for the next 35 years, we saw dozens of these songs reach official hit status. By the end of the decade, hip-hop/rap had supplanted rock as the nation’s cultudral driver when it came to music. It seemed unstoppable. America would forever be a hip-hop nation.

This month, however, a surprise. For the first time since 1990, the Billboard Top 40 was devoid of any hip-hop and rap.

What happened? Does this mean it’s on the decline and on the way out? Well, no. The genres are very alive and well. Its absence has more to do with the way charts are compiled these days than the popularity or strength of the songs.

Charts are the way the music industry keeps score with itself. The higher a song or album rises, the more opportunities for hype. Radio play increases, sales go up, and more people stream the songs. And at the end of the year, the record company executives measure themselves against each other over who had the most high-charting singles and albums.

And it used to be so simple. Charts were compiled based on sales and radio airplay. In the streaming era, there’s a complicated weighting system that tries to convert digital music consumption into old-school sales. One modern metric is the Track Equivalent Album (TEA). Under this formula, 10 digital song sales from the same album equal the sale of one album, thereby unifying digital sales with physical ones.

Billboard also has Streaming Equivalent Sales (SEA). This measurement counts on-demand plays of a song through Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and all the other platforms. If 1,500 songs are streamed from the same album, that counts the same as an old-school sale of an album. Radio airplay plus sales and TEA and SEA are supposed to give the industry an accurate and complete picture of how a certain release is doing.

Put this all together and we have a chart compilation situation that is vastly different from what late broadcaster, Casey Kasem, used to count down every weekend. There’s plenty of gamesmanship happening.

When Taylor Swift puts out an album, like her latest, The Life of a Showgirl, Swifties buy up all the available physical copies of the record. There’s the standard vinyl release and seven additional variants, each with its own artwork and on various colours of vinyl. No Tay-Tay collection is complete without all of them, and each sale of a variant counts as an individual sale. Talk about juicing the numbers.

Swifties also stream her music by the tens of millions, increasing the SEA units for The Life of a Showgirl, pushing the album even further up the charts. And because streams also factor heavily in compiling the Billboard Hot 100 (which, of course, includes the official Top 40), Swift dominates. For the week ending Nov. 8, the performer has three songs in the Top 10 and 12 in the Top 40, leaving just 28 spaces for everyone else.

Other artists are currently benefiting from the current chart rules. HUNTR/X (Huntrix), the fictional girl group from KPop Demon Hunters, is a streaming sensation with four songs in the current Top 40, leaving 24 spots — 23, if you count the song released by Rumi, Jinu, EJAE and Andrew Choi, the human voices behind HUNTR/X.

Then there are the Saja Boys, the fictional boy band from KPop Demon Hunters, who hold down two spots of their own.

Add in Morgan Wallen (two songs), Chris Brown (two songs) and Sabrina Carpenter (two songs), and there are only 17 spaces up for grabs. Those are divided up among pop artists like Olivia Dean, Alex Warren, Justin Bieber, Benson Boone, Tate McCrae and Kehlani.

Michael Jackson also made his annual appearance with Thriller (No. 32), which is always big around Halloween. There was only one debut last week, and that’s Love Girl from Megan Thee Stallion, which is more smooth R&B than anything else.

There’s another factor, too. Billboard just changed the rules regarding eligible songs. Luther by Kendrick Lamar and SZA was kicked out of the Top 40 after 46 weeks, including 13 weeks at No. 1. Why? Because it didn’t stick at No. 25 or higher after its 26th week on the chart. Boom. Gone. The song is now deemed “recurrent,” a radio term for a big hit that’s still popular after an extended period of time but no longer current. No Luther, no hip-hop/rap in the Hot 100.

Have your eyes glazed over yet? If they have, I don’t blame you. I do this for a living, and I’m having a hard time staying awake.

Remember all this the next time someone tells you that Taylor Swift is bigger than The Beatles. When they were around, Billboard operated its charts much differently. Comparing The Beatles’ chart performance to Tay-Tay’s is silly since the rules are vastly different. It’s not just apples and oranges. It’s apples and mushrooms.

Does this mean that hip-hop/rap is on the way out? Hardly. It’s a quirk of the mathematics involved in compiling charts, combined with the phenomenon of Taylor Swift and KPop Demon Hunters.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again; BigXthaPlug and Ella Langley are rap tracks bubbling under at the moment. They’ll probably advance upwards as Tay-Tay and the Demon Hunters are streamed less, and hip-hop/rap will return to the Top 40.

Anyone who grew up with Top 40 radio in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s was exposed to a wide variety of sounds and genres. Not so much anymore, right? The Billboard charts may matter less than they ever did.

[NinaFromCanadaEh]

Nina Notes

Billboard reset to count from 1958 onward

this removed Elvis' best charting years in a move that favoured newer artists

my essay from 2011:

Billboard Screws with Elvis
Posted on December 2, 2011
Billboard has long been the go to for song and album charting since music was first manufactured as a physical product to be sold.

Because the easiest way to sell something is to establish that everyone else is buying it before you – so get yours before someone else get it, you don’t want to be the last on on your street? Wait, we don’t know our neighbours anymore, scratch that.

I used to work in a Mom and Pop video store in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s – right on the cusp of VCRs coming down in price, below the $3000 they were originally – think about that, you can get Blue ray players for under $100 now! But new tech is always expensive and it seems rarely worth being an early adaptor – so as a public service, I want to continue the Meme:

Let’s all ignore any physical media after blu-ray and force the studios to stop re-selling the same content and instead, merge the big TV with computers and sell us subscriptions to your back catalog and new releases and end the need for TV broadcasters and content on physical media sales. Long tail and ever green.

Let’s face it, most of us watch entertainment in very different ways that Televsion was imagined and not changed in meaningful ways since it’s inception.

The only purpose of TV is the commercials – and we all skip over them now – so they’ve got to work in commercials as product placement, incorporate consumer messages into the programs, the same way that these products occur in our daily lives.

So, Elvis and Billboard. Elvis Info Net provides a detailed explanation of how the charting rules have been altered to minimize deceased or decades ago artists, in favour of current artists today./

In a way, it’s a bit like poorly done affirmative action – past artists are being dropped from the charts, resulting in a shifting of the history of popular music and creating false impressions.

Elvis was the second person to sell a million copies of a single. He was the first to sell consistent million sellers back to back – and if the current billboard group wants to promote current hitmakers as being impressive, then removing Elvis as the measuring standard, creates a fraudlent impression.

Honestly, if I were a performer, I’d want my chart history to stand against the best, not take out the King and measure myself against all the other pretenders.

Because that’s what’s going on.

Elvis has never been given his due as an artist – he became famous the wrong way, he was Southern and alien to the northern skewed enterainment business.

More than that, Elvis was a well mannered and respectful to authority, and when he obeyed, he was a workhorse musical and movie hitmaker who could take our minds off our daily grind and just enjoy being entertained without thought to hidden messages.

When Elvis didn’t obey, he showed us with his Sun singles, the early RCA hits, the 68 Special, the Chips Moman sessions, his true greatness eliminating all diversity resistance and blending all musical human expression into an atomic sexual volcanic force of nature:

Rockabilly was Country done Blues with a Gospel fervor delivery.

Elvis was a musical sponge and he could and did record it all – pop, rock, ballads, blues, country, rockabilly, show tunes, folk songs, Great Songbooks, Tin Pan Alley and at the end of his career, he didn’t record opera, but he was expressing even that epic a delivery with Hurt, How Great Thou Art and The American Trilogy.

If music stories organized by genre, Elvis would have to have space all over the store, in almost every category. He continues to defy description, so is taken for granted. Elvis sells whether his label or studio put any thought or effort into products or marketing.

Some songs, he was even doing sing song spoken word versions of. Softly as I leave you – with Elvis speaking and Sherril Nielsen singing the lead, with Elvis ending on the final harmony. Spine chilling and dramatic story telling, giving comfort to our life’s hurts and pain and reminding us of the joys and our greater potential.

For as much as Elvis maintained he kept his views to himself, through his song choices, Elvis made his message clear. Be kind and polite, generous and ignore the things that don’t matter, like the colour of someone’s skin over the quality of their individual character.

He quoted a lot, the Hank Williams, Men with Broken Hearts and embraced the Walk a Mile in my Shoes as a guiding principle. He wasn’t a Ghetto poser, he lived out the Great Depression in rural sharecropper father in prison and not the best of providers when he wasn’t, with a strong mother who loved her boy above all, and why he aspired to the middle class dream of ascending prosperity to provide for her, all the things that they didn’t have. Sadly, Gladys did not live long and seemed more bewildered and frightened by Elvis’ unprecedented fame and adoration, than enjoying it.

Money has a way of separating you from your friends who have none. And the Presleys went from public housing to a mansion in a few short years. Enough to turn anyone to drink and despair, if you think about how foriegn a world it was that they suddenly had that their feet. Worse, that sense that their new money would never allow the Presleys to fit in. The Unsinkable Molly Brown syndrome and it wouldn’t be until the 1960’s and post-army service, that Elvis obtained that veneer of civilized society that made him the biggest box office draw. The man who’s movies made the money that all the artistic movies were made from.

Ironic then, that it’s the Elvis light musical comedies with exotic locations and pretty girls that remain re-watchable and timeless, since they existed in the Elverse.

Because let’s face it. Elvis was and remains in a universe entirely of his own.

But that doesn’t mean it’s okay for Billboard to erase Elvis’s career from musical history.

34 years after his death and he’s still too dangerous and unpinndownable for the studio execs and establishment industry.

The only way other artists can beat him is to cheat him.

So how can any artist want to claim record milestones, when they are only comparing themselves to each other – and not against the one person who’s career path everyone is trying – and failing – to emulate?

How can we pretend that Elvis wasn’t the King?