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.
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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.
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