Teddy Swims Reaches 100 Weeks; But An Equally Historic First Is Brewing on the Hot 100

(July 24, 2025).  It’s been well documented — including on this blog — how stale the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart has been with roughly a half dozen songs that have been around for more than a year scaling the chart’s upper ranks in any given week. 

Seven months into 2025 — and over nine months into Billboard’s chart “fiscal year,” which runs from mid-October to mid-October — there are four songs that ranked among the top ten tunes of 2024 that are still riding the chart’s weekly top 20 as of the latest chart dated July 26.  They include Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” featuring Morgan Wallen, and Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control,” which just reached its historic 100th chart week while sitting comfortably at No. 9 with no end in sight.

Another long-running hit — Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” — just exited the list after slipping below No. 25, the point at which Billboard automatically removes older titles from the chart. 

Of the four that remain, “Lose Control” was the top song of 2024, placing ahead of Shaboozey’s twangy singalong at No. 2 and Boone’s roof-raising “Things” at No. 3.  At their current paces, all three of those along with the Post Malone/Morgan Wallen tune will finish among this year’s top ten hits when Billboard tallies them this fall.  Carpenter’s “Espresso” still has an outside chance to do the same. 

In fact, if the chart year ended right now, these are the songs projected to be the year’s ten biggest come the middle of October at Billboard’s cutoff, along with their year of release:

** – denotes titles that were also among last year’s ten biggest hits

Notice anything unusual? 

With just twelve weeks remaining in Billboard’s tracking year, none of the songs projected to be among the ten biggest were released in 2025.  In fact, with nine of these ten songs still appearing on the weekly chart and accumulating points towards their year-end totals, it is reasonable to conclude that only one and possibly two other contenders have a chance to displace any of them.

Those are Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” — currently at No. 15 on the weekly chart and projected at No. 13 for the year — and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” which is the No. 1 song on the weekly chart and currently registered at No. 19 for the year, as of this week.  All other songs within reach have either already fallen off the weekly Hot 100 or are too far behind in total points to catch up.

With “Pink Pony Club” being a 2020 single release (although it first appeared on Roan’s 2023 breakthrough album and first charted in 2024), only “Ordinary” — released this past February — has a chance to represent 2025 among this year’s top ten singles.  Whether or not that happens, this will go down as the first year where nine or more of the annum’s ten biggest hits will come from a previous year.  Never has there been a time in the 67-year history of the Hot 100 where only one — or none — of the current year’s releases ranked among the year’s biggest chart hits.

To underscore how little turnover the chart has seen this year, last year’s top ten songs included seven that were released that year: “A Bar Song,” “Beautiful Things,” “I Had Some Help,” “Not Like Us,” “Espresso,” “Million Dollar Baby,” and “Too Sweet.”  Only three — “Lose Control,” “Lovin on Me” and “I Remember Everything” — were holdovers from 2023.  The fact that five of those songs are among this year’s top ten only punctuates the chart’s historically slow turnover that’s been well-documented for months.

Further exacerbating this, there are currently six songs on the weekly Hot 100 that have been there longer than a year, with another — “Die With a Smile” — slated to join them in August.  The good news is that it’s one fewer than last week when seven moldy oldies graced the list.  That’s because Carpenter’s “Espresso” was pushed off the chart this week by the onslaught of Justin Bieber tunes from his new album Swag.

Maybe that’s a sign that things are about to break.  All that’s needed is for a few more superstar releases to blitz the Hot 100 and push the older fare down and off the chart.

But unless and until that happens, it’s possible that some of these tunes will be around long enough to be contenders for next year’s biggest.

Whether that’s a testament to the staying power of recent hits or a troubling sign of stagnation in pop music’s biggest barometer depends on your point of view. But either way, if new releases don’t start gaining traction soon, the Billboard Hot 100 may be headed for its most backward-looking year-end list in history — where “new” music is anything but.

Actually, it may already be too late.  

DJRob

DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.

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