Taylor Swift Becomes First Artist To Occupy All 10 Spots In Hot 100 Top 10
In the streaming era, musical artists frequently set new records with regard to Billboard’s main singles chart, the Hot 100 — especially records related to charting large quantities of songs concurrently, sometimes in clumps near the top of the chart. There was a time when a song had to be officially released as a single to crack the Hot 100 at all. Now anything that’s available to stream on an official platform can be included, which means every track on a blockbuster album has a shot at becoming a Hot 100 hit. In other words, the line between the singles chart and the albums chart is blurring.
The latest instance of this phenomenon: Today, per Billboard, Taylor Swift has become the first artist to occupy all 10 spots in the Hot 100 top 10. The achievement occurs simultaneously with the debut of Midnights, Swift’s 10th album, which posted 1.578 million equivalent album units in its first week — the biggest week for any album since Adele’s 25 put up 3.482 million units back in 2015 — to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200. Though 1.140 million of Midnights’ units derive from actual sales, it also posted the third biggest streaming week ever, with 549.26 million on-demand official streams (equating to 419,000 units in the album’s overall total). It only makes sense that Midnights, one of the most-streamed albums ever, would also lay waste to the Hot 100.
Even streaming titan Drake, who famously became the first artist since the Beatles to occupy the top five spots in the chart, has never saturated the whole top 10. (He did get nine out of 10 after the release of Certified Lover Boy last year, so it’s only a matter of time.) Still, we have to credit Swift (and Swift’s fans) for taking this stuff to new extremes.
As for how the Midnights tracks stack up against each other on the chart: “Anti-Hero” becomes Swift’s ninth #1 hit and fifth #1 debut. This ties Swift for second most debuts in the top spot alongside BTS and Ariana Grande, behind seven for Drake. She also becomes the only artist to simultaneously debut at #1 on the Billboard 200 and Hot 100 on four separate occasions; Drake is her closest competition with two such instances.
The rest of the top 10: “Lavender Haze” at #2, “Maroon” at #3, “Snow On The Beach” featuring Lana Del Rey at #4 (which surpasses the #6-peaking “Summertime Sadness” to become Del Rey’s highest charting song), “Midnight Rain” at #5, “Bejeweled” at #6, “Question…?” at #7, “You’re On Your Own, Kid” at #8, “Karma” at #9, and “Vigilante Shit” at #10.