2026: The Worst Year for Hits this Decade?
If the first four months of this year are predictive, 2026 will see fewer Top 10 hits than any year in Hot 100 History. Will new releases in May fix it?
Here on Graphs About Songs, you’ll often find me analyzing the Top 10 songs in the Billboard Hot 100. Why do I focus on the 10 songs at the pinnacle of America’s popular music chart, however? It comes down to scope.
#1 songs are too narrow. There simply aren’t enough #1 songs to accurately spot trends. Plus, one fluke song can throw off an entire trend line.
Looking at the Top 40 or the entire Hot 100, however, includes way too many songs that never became mass appeal hits. You’ve likely never heard the typical song that peak at #38, much less recall it years later.
Those songs that reach the Top 10 and stay there for at least a few weeks tend to be those songs that lots of people know. Personally, you might not love all of them, but at least you’re aware of them.
A good year has at least one new Top 10 hit each week
In a typical year, 58 songs (not counting Christmas classics) become Top 10 hits on the Hot 100. That’s about 1 new song reaching the Top 10 each week. That 58 songs number has been consistent since cassettes were common in 1992. (Before 1992, when Billboard tracked self-reported paper lists of song sales and radio airplay rankings, songs cycled through the Top 10 faster and, therefore, more songs reached the Top 10 each year.)
The number of Top 10 hits each year fell a bit during the iTunes from 2006-2017, likely due to radio stations holding on to older songs longer. 2015 saw a record low 44 new songs become Top 10 hits that year.
Top 10 hits have rebounded during the streaming era starting in 2018, largely thanks to multiple tracks from new albums from major artists debuting in the Top 10 simultaneously. In 2023, 77 different songs reached the Hot 100’s Top 10, the highest number of Top 10 hits since the paper reporting era ended in 1991.
Mathematically, you’d expect a third of the year’s Top 10 hits to reach the Top 10 from January through April (4 months / 12 months = 33%).
That’s pretty much what’s happened—although the number has dipped slightly to 29% of all Top 10 hits each year reaching the Top 10 by the end of April.
2026’s Terrible Start
Which brings us to 2026. In a healthy year with 58 Top 10 hits, you’d expect 19 songs to reach the Top 10 between January and April. For the chart week ending April 26, 2026, only 11 new songs reached the Top 10. That’s the lowest number of hits during the first third of the year since a dozen years ago.
As we examine those 11 songs below, you’ll notice some have had more impact than have others…
1. “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley: #1 peak,. Top 10 for 21 weeks and counting Released in October 2525, this song has made Langley a Country streaming staple on par with Morgan Wallen. “Choosin’ Texas” has stayed in the Top 10 thanks to continued streaming momentum, Country radio airplay, and Pop crossover radio airplay.
2. “End of Beginning” by Djo: #6 peak, Top 10 for 3 weeks: This 2022 song returned to relevance thanks to the Stranger Things finale. Although the song was not played on the show, the fact that Djo is also Stranger Things actor Joe Keery linked his hit to the show.
3. “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars: #1 peak, Top 10 for 18 weeks and counting: Mars is on a roll, with nostalgia boosting streaming of his previous decade’s hits and the huge success of his duet with Lady Gaga. Radio almost immediately started playing “I Just Might” and it has remained strong on streaming.
4. “Aperture” by Harry Styles #1 peak, Top 10 for 2 weeks: The highly anticipated but highly weird track quickly tanked on streaming.
5. “The Great Divide” by Noah Kahan: #6 peak, Top 10 for 1 week: Noah Kahan’s loyal Gen Z fan base apparently finds this one “meh”. Streaming has been ok, but not stellar.
6. “Risk It All” by Bruno Mars: #4 peak. Top 10 for 2 weeks: With streaming Momentum weaker for this song and radio still focusing on “I Just Might,” “Risk It All” only remained in the Top 10 for a couple of weeks.
7. “Stateside” by PinkPantheress with Zara Larsson: #6 peak, Top 10 for 7 weeks While radio was playing Zara Larsson’s “Midnight Sun”, streaming users made her duet with PinkPantheress the real hit. Radio has since embraced “Stateside,” as well.
8. “American Girls” by Harry Styles: #4 peak, Top 10 for 2 weeks: Radio felt more comfortable embracing this Styles song, with it rapidly being among most played songs on Top 40 radio. Fans, however, aren’t impressed. After a strong debut, streaming for “American Girls” has tanked.
9. “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” by Olivia Dean: #5 peak, Top 10 for 9 weeks: Released in September 2025, “So Easy” has seen increased radio airplay after “Man I Need” ran its course on radio, while streaming has remained very strong.
10. “Swim” by BTS: #1, Top 10 for 4 weeks: Contrary to popular belief, the BTS Army does not love everything the group generates and cannot simply will themselves another hit. “Swim’s” week-to-week streaming has been lackluster.
11. “Be Her” by Ella Langley: #2 peak, Top 10 for 6 weeks and counting: Her latest affirms her place as a Country streaming juggernaut on par with Morgan Wallen. “Ne Her” hasn’t yet crossed over to Top 40 radio, but it’s already big on Country.
To summarize, of the 11 songs reaching the Top 10 during the first four months of 2026, only five (5) songs are sustained hits, spending 4 or more weeks in the Top 10.
Based on those 11 hits from January through April, 2026 is on track to only have 38 Top 10 hits—that would be the fewest Top 10s in the history of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
Fortunately, fate has already intervened.
2026’s May Revival
In May alone, 13 different songs reached the Hot 100’s Top 10. In addition to nine (9) tracks from Drake’s three-album dump, four additional individual releases have made the Hot 100’s Top 10 in May—and three of them actually could be hits:
1. “Drop Dead” by Olivia Rodrigo: #14 peak, 4 weeks in Top 10 so far: While the verdict is still out on the song’s streaming sustainability, radio immediately embraced it.
2. “I Can’t Love You Anymore” by Ella Langley and Morgan Wallen #7 peak, 2 weeks in Top 10 so far.
3. “Doors” by Noah Kahan: #9 peak, 1 week in Top 10: While fans were excited enough for new Noah Kahan to give “Doors” a week in the Top 10, streaming quickly faded.
4. “Dracula” by Tame Impala and Jennie: #10 peak, 2 weeks in Top 10 so far. The Jennie remix of Tame Impala’s October 2025 single has bolstered interest in this song on both streaming and radio.
That’s the strongest May since 2024, when legendary radio personality and music guru Gene “Bean Baxter declared:
“This is the best US Billboard Top 10 in ages and by that I mean it’s filled with actual hit songs, not just big artist debuts. Fight me.”
As you can see below, however, 2024 was also the year where those hits dried up from June through December (as i examined in Where Did 2024’s Great New Hits Go?)
Let’s assume 2026 isn’t 2024, however. If January through May’s Top 10s are predictive of the remainder of the year, 2026 is on track to have 57 top 10 hits. While not a banner year for hit songs, it’s also not an unprecedented dearth thereof.
In future posts, we’ll examine why the streaming era has made some months significantly bigger for hit music than others, as well as why only half of the Top 10 hits are real hits thanks to streaming. Subscribe to the FREE option below to get those Graphs About Songs articles in your inbox as soon as I concoct them.
Sources for this post:
The Billboard Hot 100: https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100
Wikipedia’s Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 singles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_top-ten_singles
I've been thinking about this article since I read it yesterday, so forgive this lengthy near-rant. And while the first half of 2024 showed promise because of its variety, which included some fandom-driven hits by Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, it all came to a screeching halt, to my eyes, when Shaboozey's "A Bar Song" ascended to #1 on the Hot 100 and stayed there for 19 non-consecutive weeks. That it happened a second time in five years (after "Old Town Road") should have caused the biz to watch the next year in charts closely. And it didn't, it allowed the situation to get worse. And then Billboard changed its longevity rules, which made a lot of people happy. But now we are seeing a different upshot to that change. The house-cleaning occurred for a second time since last November when "Ordinary" and "Golden" were forced off the chart by the temporary Drake invasion. That only means as Drake's songs drop down, the same ones in place before the invasion will rise back up. Radio has lost a lot of its driving force on the Hot 100 over the last 10 years due to fandom and passive listening habits on streaming, both of which are drivers behind this year's few Top 10 songs and do not factor into radio's equation much. Don't forget too that Madison Beer's "Make You Mine" was a Top 10 Top 40 radio hit in 2024 that never appeared on the Hot 100, and there were others that have reached radio's Top 20 that missed the chart too. The biz has forgotten about the rest of its audience and is only focused on where the money is going. We also shouldn't forget that streams driving the data are not the same as physical units. In the days before streaming, we bought ONE copy of a record. Our repeated plays at home didn't count. Now passive listening habits where the same playlists of favourites are played over and over account for a massive part of the data. Radio tried with making the Harry Styles records events and it didn't work. So I can see why it's being cautious about Olivia Rodrigo's very good "The Cure". What I'm getting at is that I don't think 2026 is going to get any better unless some significant changes occur. And they won't because they are dollar-driven and rhe biz moves at a snail's pace to make any changes.
Appreciate the insight. As a 'hit music' buyer for over 50 years, I have always found 200-300 new songs every year to buy and play. (Vinyl, Cassingles, CD's, iTunes.) I expanded my listening to country (90's) and Contemporary Christian (00's) as I searched for new hit (aka pop) music. I have always tracked my plays and enjoyed figuring out my favorites every year. I am becoming dangerously close to giving up...I just cannot find the 20-25 new 'singles' every month to keep my tradition going. I update my playlist weekly...and the oldest song on my current playlist with 14 weeks is "You Thrill Me" by Rob Thomas with most songs lasting just a few weeks. My willingness to buy iTunes and physical copies to ensure the artist is rewarded is getting too difficult to continue. I am anxiously awaiting the next generation (as you promised ;-) to re-define pop music and expand the format but I am getting cynical it will happen.