Early January is usually a slow stretch when it comes to the Billboard charts, but 2025 is giving us a twist, with a few stars making big moves. Lil Baby and Bad Bunny debut in the top two spots on the Billboard 200, while Morgan Wallen experiences a huge surge in the Hot 100. But that wasn't enough to knock down Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars' "Die With a Smile," which sits atop the singles chart for a second straight week.
TOP ALBUMS
Last week's Billboard 200 offered a clear picture of the status quo at the beginning of 2025: With the holidays an already-distant memory, the chart documented huge weeks for SZA's SOS Deluxe: LANA (No. 1) and Kendrick Lamar's GNX (No. 2), followed by a top 10 full of usual suspects like Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Morgan Wallen and the Wicked soundtrack.
This week, we get a fresh jolt of energy, as SZA and Lamar make way for two blockbuster debuts. Lil Baby enters the chart at No. 1 with WHAM — an acronym for "Who Hard As Me," not a tribute to the duo who spent last Christmas in the top 5 — which becomes the rapper's fourth consecutive chart-topper and seventh album to hit the top 10.
Lil Baby and his team pulled out all the stops to make sure the artist's WHAM rap would make it to the edge of heaven on this week's Billboard charts. The guest-packed album came out on the first Friday in January — traditionally a slow spot when it comes to new music — then got extra juice from an extended edition just four days later. That version added four new songs, as part of a set that could, at least at first, only be purchased via Lil Baby's webstore.
Those machinations were necessary, because on the first Sunday in January — an unusual release date if ever there was one — another chart-topping superstar exercised his freedom to release an album. Bad Bunny's DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS out-performed WHAM on streaming services, even with two fewer days' worth of streams, but couldn't match Lil Baby's first-week sales numbers — especially given the release of additional tracks a few days into WHAM's existence.
With WHAM (the week's top seller) at No. 1 and DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (the week's top streamer) at No. 2, SZA can't have everything she wants, so SOS drops from No. 1 to No. 3. The next four records also slide two spots down: Lamar's GNX, Carpenter's Short n' Sweet, the Wicked soundtrack and Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft. Morgan Wallen's One Thing at a Time, Gracie Abrams' The Secret of Us and Tyler, The Creator's CHROMAKOPIA all hold steady at No. 8, No. 9 and No. 10, respectively.
TOP SONGS
Last year, Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" posted a record-tying 19 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1. For a bunch of those weeks, No. 2 belonged to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars' "Die With a Smile," which finally claimed the chart's top spot last week — its 20th week on the Billboard Hot 100.
Now, for a second week in a row, the two songs' 2024 roles have been reversed, as "Die With a Smile" sits atop the chart and Shaboozey stays perched on the outside looking in at No. 2. Billie Eilish's "Birds of a Feather" is similarly baked in, as that durable hit sits at No. 3 once again.
Then we finally get a big mover, as Morgan Wallen's new single "Smile" leaps from No. 27 (where it debuted last week) all the way to No. 4. As with Bad Bunny on the albums chart, "Smile" came out part-way through last week's window of eligibility; it dropped Dec. 31, while the chart covered the period stretching from Dec. 27 to Jan. 2. So now it gets a full week to show its stuff, which was more than enough to make it the 12th top-10 hit of Wallen's career.
Wallen actually has two songs in this week's top 10 — "I Had Some Help," the Post Malone hit in which he features, dips from No. 8 to No. 9 — but he's not the only star who can make that claim. In addition to appearing in "Die With a Smile," Bruno Mars holds at No. 5 with "APT.," his duet with BLACKPINK's ROSÉ.
That leaves four other holdovers in the top 10. Teddy Swims' eternal hit "Lose Control" — which came out in the summer of 2023 before being named Billboard's biggest song of 2024 — dips from No. 4 to No. 6. Kendrick Lamar's "Luther (feat. SZA)" holds at No. 7, Gracie Abrams' "That's So True" drops from No. 6 to No. 8, and Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" hangs in there for another week, but slips from No. 9 to No. 10.
WORTH NOTING
Looking for another data point to illustrate how radically streaming has reshaped consumers' music-listening habits? Let's compare this week's Billboard 200 — a nice, quiet January week without holiday titles or a ton of brand-new releases — to the Billboard 200 from the same week in 2024.
Care to guess how many of the titles overlap?
That is to say, how many of the country's 200 most popular albums right now were also among the country's 200 most popular albums one calendar year ago? Anyone who's scanned the Billboard 200 in recent years can sense that there'd be a fair bit of overlap, given the size of Taylor Swift's catalog and the sheer number of greatest-hits collections by household names like Queen, Fleetwood Mac and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
But would you have guessed that 124 of the top 200 albums are on the exact same chart — a chart that's supposed to reflect the ever-shifting tastes of the popular-music audience — an entire year apart?
Some of the similarities are downright eerie. Journey's Greatest Hits is currently No. 97; it was No. 99 last year. Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III was No. 180 last year; it now sits at No. 175. Greatest Hits by 2Pac has been on the Billboard 200 for a total of 556 weeks, and in the last year, its chart movement has taken it from No. 103 to… No. 103.
It's tempting to suggest that Billboard consider changing its chart formulas — and to note that Billboard has, behind its paywall, more granular charts with information about who's bubbling up from the underground, attracting the most radio airplay or blowing up on TikTok. But the real issue here is with streaming algorithms — and, on a larger scale, with artificial intelligence in general.
The purpose of a streaming algorithm is to ingest your preferences — artists you've liked, music you've enjoyed, genres that interest you — and tailor a playlist to suit those tendencies. But that naturally, by design, creates a doom loop in which you keep re-ingesting the same stuff; your tastes aren't given much of a chance to expand or evolve.
When they're working right, and when listeners want them to perform right, algorithms can still facilitate exploration and discovery; they can take a single song search and feed you similar material that introduces you to other songs and artists you might like. But the Billboard charts are demonstrating how rarely that's happening on a grand scale. Scanning today's pop charts, with their 62% stasis year-over-year, is a bit like glancing over your local movie listings and seeing that every theater is still showing Smokey and the Bandit.
As AI gets more powerful and ever-present, it's hard not to fear a worsening of this pop-cultural calcification. Once everything we've already consumed has been capped and cauterized, we're left only to remix and recycle what we already know at the expense of new art, new ideas, new forms of expression and ways of looking at the world. How are we supposed to evolve, once we've limited ourselves to what's already been expressed?
Anyway, if you're feeling the same way — like you're subsisting on digested remains at the tail-end of a musical Human Centipede — at least now you've got one more data point to back that up. That's fun, right?
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