Why It’s Easier Than Ever to Get a Billboard Number One Hit

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 15, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 15, 2024 |

When I started writing this piece, it was expected that the highest-ranked song on the Billboard Hot 100 will be ‘Carnival’ by Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign. The Ye stans, who have committed so thoroughly to their devotion to the disgraced anti-Semitic rapper that one wonders if it’s a bit, have declared this to be proof that West is back on top. See, the public has embraced him once more after so cruelly canceling him for saying that he saw good things in Hitler. What a success story. Sure, okay. To believe that, you have to see the Billboard chart as an indomitable titan of music, and as the past several years have proven, it’s a giant that is so easily toppled.

Oh, and by the time I submitted this article, ‘Carnival’ had not reached number one. So, ha. Moving on…

The Billboard Hot 100 list is the music industry standard record chart in the US, a weekly recording of the biggest songs of the time. It collates data from sales (physical and digital), online streaming data, and radio airplay. Its basic purpose is to show how popular a song is at the given moment, to track what is going on across America, and what the changing tastes of the nation are. Billboard’s first chart was published in 1913, a list of the best-selling sheet music of the time. Now, it’s as much concerned with Spotify as CD sales, and its struggle to keep up with a hugely evolving landscape — one that even the record labels stumble around — has left it vulnerable to manipulation.

Fudging the numbers to get a hit in this manner is nothing new. The history of payola — paying radio stations to play a song without disclosing the deal — is decades old and steeped in industry-wide scandal. DJ Alan Freed, who was considered pivotal in helping to introduce rock and roll music to young and diverse audiences, saw his career destroyed by accepting bribes. Music-sharing websites were initially seen as a way to rob corrupt stations of their stranglehold over the business as they allowed labels and promoters to deal with them face-to-face. It didn’t take long for streaming, once it became its own monopoly of power and influence, to be accused of replicating history. A 2021 op-ed from Rolling Stone said that Spotify’s Discovery Mode was ‘a thinly veiled pay-for-play scheme’ in the same vein as the payola of old.

Streaming fraud doesn’t need record labels to hand over hard cash to get the job done now. They just ask their fans to do it for them. None of this is secret; it’s all happening in the open. Justin Bieber was so eager to make ‘Yummy’ a hit that he shared a fan-made graphic on social media that instructed Beliebers on how to game Spotify, iTunes and YouTube in order to help send the song to number one. Helpful tips included creating playlists on Spotify that were just ‘Yummy’ on repeat and letting them play repeatedly, even while you slept or had them at a low volume. The post also encouraged fans outside of the US to use a VPN to ensure their streams counted towards Billboard’s metric.

The full numbers reveal the state of the field and how drastically things have changed in the streaming era. According to Talk of the Charts, ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ by Beyoncé got to number one on Billboard with 25.5 million streams and 22,000 hard sales. That song is also available in multiple forms, including a clean version and an acapella one, and whatever version you listen to, it counts towards the overall picture.

And that’s another way the system is played. Take ‘Yes, And?’ by Ariana Grande, the debut single from her latest album, Eternal Sunshine. The song received decent reviews, but it wasn’t considered an all-time banger or anything, especially compared to some of the tracks in her back catalogue. It got to the number one spot on Billboard but didn’t hold onto it long, and it only got there because there were no fewer than 14 different versions of the song available to buy or stream. This was good news for anyone who wanted to listen to ‘Yes, And?’ sped up or slowed down or extended or with Mariah Carey shoehorned in. It was savvy in how it beat TikTok audio-makers to the punch by offering the song in various iterations for instant virality, but it mostly existed to bolster those Billboard numbers. Arianators had oh-so-many versions of the song to help push it to number one. Granted, it tumbled from that spot shortly afterward and is continuing to slip down the chart, but its initial objective was achieved. Everyone does this, but Grande’s team took it to its ludicrous conclusion.

So, if the system is this easily gamed, does it still have any legitimacy? Does it still carry the power it used to embody? Well, yes, but mostly because everyone in the industry needs it to (that and, while it’s not the only game in town, it is the one with the weight of history behind it.) Making solid money as a musician in 2024 is a veritable nightmare thanks to the obvious shakedowns of streaming, controlling record label contracts, and the internet. Artists receive shockingly little from Spotify streams, even if they’re listened to millions of times every year. Peter Frampton, one of the biggest-selling artists of his era, shared on Twitter in 2018 that 55 million streams of his most popular song, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, earned him $1,700. Imagine how much smaller that number gets for musicians of mid-popularity without decades of songs in their repertoire. It’s no surprise that some of the biggest stalwarts of the business have to tour endlessly and well into retirement age. They need all the promo and buzz they can get, and even at its most degraded, a Billboard hit still means something to someone.

‘Yummy’ was a bad song, but I doubt it would have gotten that Grammy nomination had it not been a Billboard number two hit (ha.) No matter how weak your reviews are or how much your own fans might be dissatisfied with your output, you can always say, hey, I got a Billboard hit. We’re a culture obsessed with tangible proof of one’s success. Online fandom is especially obsessed with the cold hard numbers of popularity to prove that their fave is better than yours. It’s how we’ve ended up with these stan accounts giddily sharing that the seventh-best song on their singer’s second-worst album just got 100k Spotify streams. Okay? And?

The hope with creating a hit, however artificial one’s methods, is that it’ll encourage organic interest in the product. Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful tools we have for celebrating pop culture, and it’s extremely tough to replicate or bolster. Your devoted fans might scream from the rooftops about getting your new song to number one but that doesn’t mean they’ll keep listening to it once the job is done. I’m not sure even the hardened Beliebers can make a case for ‘Yummy.’

Billboard isn’t going anywhere. Even when it becomes totally obsolete, the music industry will still cling to it because the traditional entertainment world is a decade behind the times and takes too long to move on. Right now, it mostly seems to be the denizen of stan culture battles and publicity panic. It’s not as though Billboard themselves are unaware of their crumbling credibility, but the façade of legitimacy will carry them for a few more years. As far as they’re concerned, the business is operating as desired, as long as you don’t look too hard at what’s happening.