The holidays are about to shake up the pop charts, and not a moment too soon: There's precious little movement in the Top 10 of this week's Hot 100, as Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" sits at No. 1 for an 18th nonconsecutive week. (He's now one week shy of tying the all-time record.) On the albums chart, Tyler, The Creator's Chromakopia survives a K-pop-driven challenge to retain the crown for a third consecutive week. But amid all that stasis, there's unmistakable momentum behind Gracie Abrams, who's surging on both charts — thanks in part to her placement as the opening act on Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.
TOP ALBUMS
For the past two weeks, Tyler, The Creator's Chromakopia has been a dominant chart-topper: It's posted huge streaming and sales numbers and landed three different songs in the Top 10. This week, though, it wound up in a tight race for the Billboard 200's top spot, facing off against the all-caps-loving K-pop band TOMORROW X TOGETHER and its new album, The Star Chapter: SANCTUARY. Billboard ranks albums based on a formula called "equivalent album units" — a cocktail of sales and streaming — and Tyler came out on top, narrowly, by a roughly 104,000-to-98,000 margin.
Though TOMORROW X TOGETHER is a frequent resident of the Top 10 — it's the group's sixth album to land there and second this year — the sledding is about to get considerably tougher, given that 95,000 of those 98,000 equivalent album units came from sales. (Sales are great! But they don't tend to carry over from week to week.) Expect a steep drop on next week's chart.
Speaking of steep week-two drops, last week's Top 10 debuts — Lil Uzi Vert's Eternal Atake 2 and The Cure's Songs of a Lost World — plummet to earth this time around, as Lil Uzi Vert slides from No. 3 to No. 36 and The Cure tumbles from No. 4 to No. 74.
With Lil Uzi Vert and The Cure out, the remainder of the Top 10 is stuffed with old reliables. Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet takes a small (and most likely temporary) dip from No. 2 to No. 3, while The Secret of Us by Gracie Abrams — more on her in a moment — continues its rise, ticking up from No. 5 to No. 4. Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft jumps from No. 7 to No. 5, leapfrogging Chappell Roan's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which holds steady at No. 6.
Rounding out the Top 10, Morgan Wallen's One Thing at a Time climbs from No. 10 to No. 7; Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department rises from No. 9 to No. 8, switching spots with Rod Wave's Last Lap; and Noah Kahan's sturdy Stick Season climbs from No. 14 to No. 10.
TOP SONGS
There's an absurd logjam atop the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, as the top five remains exactly the same as last week. Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" holds at No. 1 for an 18th nonconsecutive week, placing the song just one week short of the all-time record, set in 2019 by Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)."
Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars' "Die With a Smile," Billie Eilish's "Birds of a Feather," Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" and Teddy Swims' "Lose Control" round out the Top 5, in the exact same order as last week. Heck, "Lose Control" has sat in the Top 10 for 44 weeks now. We'll all be sick of "All I Want for Christmas Is You" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" soon enough, but even they haven't been in the Top 10 practically all year.
The rest of the Top 10 is similarly awash in familiar songs, all moving one rung down in lockstep: Post Malone's "I Had Some Help," which features Morgan Wallen, slides back a spot, from No. 6 to No. 7; Sabrina Carpenter's "Taste" slips from No. 7 to No. 8; Benson Boone's "Beautiful Things" drops from No. 8 to No. 9; and Wallen's "Love Somebody" takes a step back from No. 9 to No. 10. Sense a theme? Everyone is making room for the aforementioned Gracie Abrams, whose new single "That's So True" makes a notable leap from No. 13.
Often, the simple movement of songs up and down the chart can be misleading: A song can experience increases in airplay, sales and streaming, yet still be pushed down by tracks posting flashier gains; at other times, a song can appear to be on the rise, when instead it's merely benefitting from other ones fading more quickly. But when a song surges up a chart in which everything else is basically motionless? That's momentum. To an unmistakable degree, Gracie Abrams is leveling up as a pop star.
It's not that Abrams is coming out of nowhere here. A year ago, she was nominated for best new artist at the Grammys, while The Secret of Us entered the Billboard 200 at No. 2 this summer. But there are three major catalysts for her sudden chart surges: 1) She released a deluxe edition of The Secret of Us with new bonus tracks, including "That's So True," a few weeks ago; 2) that song has blown up on TikTok, which factors into chart performance and 3) She's been opening for Taylor Swift on a string of Eras Tour dates in the U.S. Oh, and there's one more catalyst worth noting: Pop radio stations, after serving up a steady diet of seemingly little more than Shaboozey and Billie Eilish for months on end, have made room for a new song, and it just happens to be by Gracie Abrams.
When people talk about the power Taylor Swift wields in the music industry, they often dwell on her impossibly lucrative Eras Tour (and its blockbuster movie offshoot), her chart dominance (15 weeks at No. 1 for The Tortured Poets Department), her Grammy success (she's won album of the year four times, and could well win the prize again in February) or her fan army. But Swift has also become perhaps the most dominant force propelling up-and-coming acts to superstardom — which, as you might have guessed, is incredibly hard to do in 2024.
Look at three acts who've opened for her on the Eras Tour just this year: Benson Boone is nominated for best new artist at the 2025 Grammys, and his "Beautiful Things" still sits in the Top 10 nearly a year after its release. Sabrina Carpenter ranks among the year's biggest breakout stars; she's up for six Grammys and had three songs in the Top 10 simultaneously for weeks on end this summer. Now, Abrams has a Top 10 single for the first time in her career. (This phenomenon isn't new, either, as Swift's past opening acts — ranging from Phoebe Bridgers to Ed Sheeran — have capitalized on The Taylor Swift Effect in a big way.)
Naturally, Swift isn't the only superstar with long coattails: The career of Carpenter's stiffest competition for best new artist, Chappell Roan, experienced a colossal lift from opening for Olivia Rodrigo on tour at the beginning of this year. (No, it wasn't just her Tiny Desk concert that propelled her into the stratosphere.) These days, you don't just need music-industry executives on your side, nor is viral success on TikTok enough on its own. If you're a star looking to become a superstar, your best bet is a big-time, hard-touring benefactor.
WORTH NOTING
This week's Billboard charts are the first to drop following the Nov. 8 announcement of the 2025 Grammy nominees. And if you're suspecting that there's a correlation between chart success and Grammy recognition, this year's batch of nominees isn't likely to disabuse you of that notion.
A look at the eight-song record of the year field yields three chart-toppers — Beyoncé's "Texas Hold 'Em," Taylor Swift's "Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)" and Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us" — and four more Top 10 hits: Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" (still at No. 11), Billie Eilish's "Birds of a Feather" (still at No. 3), Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" (still at No. 4) and The Beatles' "Now and Then," which peaked at No. 7 about a year ago and disappeared from the charts shortly thereafter. Only Charli xcx's "360" failed to crack the Top 10, peaking at No. 41, but it's from a blockbuster album (Brat) that's become one of the biggest pop-culture stories of the year.
Song of the year, an award for composition, is even more hit-forward than that, with five chart-toppers — the three listed above, plus Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" and Carpenter's "Please Please Please" — joining "Birds of a Feather," "Good Luck, Babe!" and Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars' "Die With a Smile," which has been sitting at No. 2 for weeks. That's eight nominees, eight Top 5 hits.
Finally, the album of the year field assembles six of the year's most commercially dominant records — by Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, Chappell Roan, Beyoncé and Billie Eilish — and tosses in two left-field outliers: André 3000's 87-minute flute odyssey, New Blue Sun, which peaked at No. 34 earlier this year, and Grammys über-favorite Jacob Collier, whose Djesse Vol. 4 has never so much as cracked the Billboard 200. (In fact, Collier has never placed an album on the chart in his career.)
Of the eight nominees, only Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter seems to have experienced any appreciable Grammy-nomination bump, as it reenters this week's chart at No. 169. But the real Grammy bumps will come sometime after the awards themselves are handed out on Feb. 2. Who knows? If Collier wins album of the year — which would be weird, even for the Grammys, but you never know — he may finally join his fellow nominees on the pop charts after all.
ONE MORE THING
There's a new Holiday Harbinger this week, as the season's first Christmas song to reenter the Hot 100 has arrived a little earlier than usual. And, no, it's not "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" or "All I Want For Christmas Is You." It's 1984's "Last Christmas" by Wham!, and it's at No. 38 this week. Though the song stayed frozen at No. 4 for weeks on end last season — always behind the two aforementioned chestnuts and Bobby Helms' 1957 trifle, "Jingle Bell Rock" — its early rise this year should be considered a warning shot in the battle for holiday supremacy.
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