In 2025, 'Walk My Walk' by Breaking Rust, an AI-generated artist, topped a Billboard country chart.

One man used an AI band called the Velvet Sundown to conduct what he called an elaborate social experiment.

Several major artists have embraced manipulating the Billboard charts

Billboard is supposed to be an accurate, objective representation of the country’s listening habits, but artists and their fans have discovered ways to manipulate the magazine’s methodology in order to push tracks to the top of the charts. In 2018, Taylor Swift rewarded fans for purchasing her album multiple times; in 2020, Justin Bieber reposted suggestions that fans repeatedly stream one of his songs while they sleep.

TikTok's algorithm has changed the way hits are made

Songs aimed at TikTok's algorithm—designed for viral dances or soundtracking common experiences—often find success on the Billboard charts. An early example was Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road," which used his memes and a country-trap beat from the Netherlands to rise to the top of the Billboard charts.

Billboard began incorporating streaming in 2007

For nearly 50 years, the Billboard charts primarily relied on radio airplay and retail sales. But in 2007, the magazine began incorporating early streaming services AOL Music and Yahoo! Music into its methodology, and later worked with Spotify, YouTube, and other platforms. A single stream was not weighed as heavily as a purchase of a physical CD or vinyl record. Still, streaming’s impact became evident when songs with minimal radio airplay began climbing the charts, as seen with Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” which did exceptionally well on YouTube.

After taking a break for over a decade, Liza Minnelli released a new track using AI arrangements

In the 2026 song "Kids, Wait Til You Hear This," the singer proudly claims that the vocals are all her own, though AI generates the background music. The dance track shows Minnelli venturing into the deep house genre, straying from her traditional pop and show tunes background. The song is part of an ElevenLabs album featuring other AI-generated tunes, and shares a title with her 2026 memoir.

Country's sound continues to evolve

Country music is having a moment. In 2023, it saw the biggest growth in market share of any genre—up nearly 22%. This overview traces country’s rise from Appalachian folk roots to its current pop, rock, and hip-hop-infused wave, with artists like Beyoncé and Post Malone joining the mix.

One writer traces the evolution of a Billboard chart over 25 years

Billboard introduced its Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1988, looking to capture the rising popularity of acts like the Cure, REM, and U2. Music writer and Billboard obsessive Chris Molanphy traces the chart from his earliest days through grunge, alternative, and corporate eras, demonstrating just how much taste changes over time.

Listen to the 'world's first' song made by a quantum computer and AI

UK startup, Moth, collaborated with electronic artist ILĀ to create the world's first song using quantum-powered generative AI. The technology has the potential to help create more personalized content based on input parameters, such as music or dialogue in games.

How AI helped the Beatles win their eighth Grammy

It’s been decades since the legendary British rock band broke up, yet they still managed to snag a Grammy at the 2025 awards ceremony. This feat is thanks to AI, specifically machine-learning technology, to isolate and clean up different components of a late 1970s recording. This mini-documentary shows how the band's surviving members crafted “Now and Then” with the modern technology.

A technological breakthrough altered how Billboard determined what was popular.

Viral pop artists create systems of participation, not just music

Musicologist (and Swift expert) Paula Clare Harper weighs in on the factors that make music go viral. Tracks designed for shareability that feed well into content algorithms on streaming platforms are able to grow in popularity, with traditional human gatekeepers sidelined.

Traditional bands largely disappeared from the Billboard charts in the 21st century, mostly replaced by solo artists.

Readers discovered AI prompts in several romantasy books

In 2025, readers discovered AI prompts in three writers' texts, with one even instructing the AI bot to make a passage sound more like another romance writer. This Futurism piece digs into the scandals and how it's contributed to readers' skepticism about the genre's more prolific writers.

Billboard’s Hot 100 methodology is notoriously private

The magazine’s singles chart is based on on-demand streams (from platforms like Spotify), digital sales (from stores like iTunes), and radio airplay. Not all of those sources are weighted equally, though—sales are more important than airplay, and airplay is more significant than streams. In 2018, Billboard began weighing streams from premium subscriptions more heavily than free streams (like listening to a song on Pandora).

Some critics say comparing chart rankings across decades is meaningless

Although Billboard’s charts are presented as objective measures of a given song’s popularity, the company’s changing methodology (alongside changes in technology and listener habits) has made weighing chart success from different eras an imperfect science.

2025 marked the first time in 35 years a hip-hop song wasn't in the top 40

The Billboard Hot 100 chart dated October 25, 2025, didn't have any rap or hip-hop songs in its top 40 singles, something that hadn't happened since Feb. 2, 1990. One explanation is a Billboard methodology change, and another is Taylor Swift's "The Life of a Showgirl."

Country music's popularity skyrocketed in the 21st century, establishing itself as a dominant force on the Billboard charts in the 2010s.

TikTok isn't factored into a song's rank on the Billboard charts, but it can have an impact

Billboard ranks a song's chart position based on its radio airplay, its physical sales, and its streaming numbers (across Spotify and other platforms), but doesn't include user-generated content, meaning it doesn't include TikTok videos. Keith Caulfield, Billboard's managing director of charts and data operations, notes that TikTok still has an impact, though, because listeners will often stream the app's most popular songs on other platforms.

How Spotify creates niche genres

One of Spotify's most recognizable features is its playlists. The provider offers an endless stream of strangely titled mixes with names like "Hyperpop," "Phonk," and "Lorem," which suggest uniform genres and scenes despite featuring seemingly random assortments of artists and songs. This article unpacks why Spotify organizes its music in this way and how, unintentionally, the process erases organic movements that developed outside of the app.

Is the love song dying?

This visual essay, compiled using 65 years of industry data, is an entertaining trip through the history of pop music, exploring whether or not music has grown less romantic. But, at its heart, this isn't about the Billboard charts—it's about the many different ways we define romance.

Stephen Wolfram on AI's rapid progress & the "Post-Knowledge Work" era

AI, as a concept, has been around since at least the 1950s, but it's only in the last year or so that the technology has been able to equal humans at many tasks -- and in many cases surpass humans. In this podcast, mathematician and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram provides an AI 101, explaining how we got here, how highly advanced chatbots like ChatGPT work, and what our world is in store for next.

Decoding the hype around AI

2022 was the year AI broke onto the scene, with applications like ChatGPT amazing users with its ability to generate realistic-sounding answers. Technologist Arvind Narayanan presents a clear-eyed view of what the technologies can (and can't) do.

Chris Stapleton's 'Tennessee Whiskey' is the bestselling country record of all time.

TikTok is resurrecting sampled songs

Rapper Doechii's song "Anxiety" has become a bona fide chart hit. Interestingly, its popularity on TikTok propelled Gotye's "Somebody I Used to Know" (the song Doechii's song samples) and Sleep Hallow's "A N X I E T Y" (a song that samples the Doechii song) onto the charts as well.

Browse over a century of issues of Billboard, the definitive music industry magazine, to trace nearly every American musical trend of the past century.

Researchers found that by mid-2025, around 35% of newly published websites utilized AI for language generation

The study also found that pages using AI narrow the range of ideas and perspectives and skew more positively, though the measurable impacts on factual accuracy and writing style variation remain unclear.

Spotify's most-streamed albums to date

Interested in people's listening habits? Look through this up-to-date list to find out the most streamed albums on Spotify. See which musicians top the list by year, decade, or even all-time.

YouTube no longer provides data to Billboard

Billboard began using data from YouTube in 2013, tracking the platform’s most popular songs as it became a hub for listeners. That relationship ended in January 2026, when YouTube announced it was ending the partnership, citing a disagreement over how Billboard weighted premium users more heavily than free users.

Three rock stars who made great country music

Steven Tyler, Tina Turner, and Darius Rucker all crossed into country. The author claims the trio shared a common trait: they weren't chasing a new audience. Instead, they were delving deeper into a sound already present in their work.

Music today is often intended to circulate on social media

Artists are increasingly using TikTok and other short form video platforms as a space to promote their music. One scholar notes this emphasis, and connect it to Taylor Swift's early use of social media to promote her own work and brand.

Use generative AI to create a musical track from a text prompt

Suno, a web-based, text-to-music generator, takes a prompt—such as a music style, along with a general lyric idea—and can produce a highly polished, realistic-sounding tune in a matter of seconds.

Drake has more top-five Hot 100 hits than any other artist

In 2022, the rapper’s collaboration with DJ Khaled and Lil Baby, “Staying Alive,” reached the number five slot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That was his 30th track to reach the top five, surpassing the Beatles’ record of 29, which they achieved in 1970 with “The Long and Winding Road.”

The sound of country music has evolved over its lifespan

Like any genre, country music is constantly evolving. This in-depth analysis from NPR illustrates how the notoriously traditionally minded industry has been redefined, time and time again, by its greatest artists. More recently, it highlights stars like Kacey Musgraves, Sam Hunt, and Maren Morris for taking it in new directions.

Watch an AI-generated short film

The Waymark production company created "The Frost" using the AI platform DALL-E 2. Set in an apocalyptic future where the weather has been stalled, the film was made by stitching together hundreds of clips, each only a few seconds long.

The next technology epoch is here

From ChatGPT to DALL-E, 2022 saw the mainstream emergence of artificial intelligence for consumer use. Here's how these platforms will disrupt today's five biggest tech companies—Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

Warren Buffett has worried that AI might end up being as consequential as the development of the nuclear bomb

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett is one of the many people who’ve come face-to-face with the downside effects of AI, and in particular, deepfakes. He was recently shown a deepfake of himself in a video, which caused him to worry about how bad actors will take advantage of the technology.

AI gained mainstream attention with tools like IBM Watson and Apple’s Siri

With the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which drew over 100 million weekly users in just two months, natural language processing and understanding could be achieved at scale via machine learning. Unlike earlier artificial intelligence that could pull stored knowledge, generative AI produces text, images, or sounds.

Technologies labeled “AI” have historically lost that title after widespread adoption

Generative AI is the latest entry in a recurring cycle where emerging tools start as "AI" until they become common software, like databases or machine learning. Generative AI and large language models may be the next platform shift after smartphones and the Web.

The artists with the most No. 1 singles

Scoring a No. 1 single is a difficult task—less than 4% of the songs that have made Billboard's Hot 100 chart have ever reached the top spot. This list breaks down the most elite hitmakers in Billboard history, including the Supremes, Taylor Swift, and the Beatles, who released an incredible 20 No. 1 singles.

After Beyoncé won the Grammy for best country album, the Grammys created a new category

The singer took home the award for best country album in 2025 for "Cowboy Carter." Months after the awards, and some criticism from the country community, the Grammys announced a new category for 2026: best contemporary country album. Ostensibly, that makes room for the genre's traditionalists and its innovators, though the distinction between the two categories is vague.

'The Life of a Showgirl' was Swift's 15th chart-topping album

That places her second on Billboard's all-time list, though streaming has significantly changed how "sales" are interpreted. Prior to the shift to digital music, Billboard's album chart relied solely on sales of physical units. Since 2014, the chart has also considered streams from services like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.

Taylor Swift was the first artist to occupy all of Billboard's Top 10

Swift's 2022 release "Midnights" led to an unprecedented feat: For the first time in Billboard history, the entire top 10 of the Hot 100 was occupied by the same artist. Two years later, "The Tortured Poets Department" would occupy the first 14 slots on the chart.

Experts don't believe upbeat tunes, called 'recession pop,' are legitimate recession indicators

Social media users have begun deeming pop music by the likes of Kesha and Katy Perry a "recession indicator" as they try to predict the next economic downturn.

Spotify and AncestryDNA launched a genetic music playlist offering

The playlist offering in 2018 purported to make a unique playlist based on cultural inheritance. The service required users to link their account, select the top five ethnic regions from their AncestryDNA results, and then Spotify would create the playlist based on that data.

Taylor Swift influenced record labels to change the way they write contracts

In addition to being a successful songwriter, Taylor Swift is a change-maker in the music industry. She asserted creative control over her music, re-recording her earlier albums after she lost the rights to them, and sparked a vinyl revolution in a digital age.

In the '90s, country aimed for stadiums

While the early 1900s built the template for country music as a genre, the 1990s pushed the music into the mainstream, setting the course for country’s modern ubiquity. Artists like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain pushed against the genre’s orthodoxy, turning the music into blockbuster entertainment with a pop sheen.

Superfans of K-pop group BTS gamed the Billboard chart

In 2021, the boy band scored a number one hit with “Butter,” its second English-language track. As Stereogum writer Tom Breihan points out, though, it rose to the top of the charts without actually being the most popular song in the country. Other songs were considerably more popular on streaming platforms, but BTS’ hyperdevoted fanbase realized that purchasing digital downloads weighed more heavily in Billboard’s methodology. Recognizing an opportunity, BTS dropped the price of a download to 69 cents, securing their place on the top of the charts.

Billie Eilish broke records at the 2020 Grammys

Alternative pop star Billie Eilish had a fascinating rise to fame. She cemented her album "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" in Grammys history by becoming the first woman and youngest person to win all the Big Four awards in the same night.

Visualizing the AI investment wave

This data visualization from Reuters shows how massive AI investment has become by December 2025—revealing that, in today’s dollars, spending has surpassed the combined total of the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project.

Beat Generation iconoclast William S. Burroughs once appeared in a Nike ad, singing the praises of 'new technology.'