I have been talking about this in another thread but it's getting genuinely worrying that hardly anything is sticking with the general public this year.

Rein Me In has seen off big comebacks from even Harry Styles and Olivia Rodrigo and the Top 40 is packed with ancient hits whilst hardly any fresh tunes seem to be making a dent in the chart/popular consciousness.

I won't struggle to make a spring-summer playlist but that's because there's enough radio puts out there that appeals to me regardless of chart performance etc but I do wonder how slightly less obsessive music fans feel about how things are going so far this year.

What needs to happen?

Which songs are the public going to think about when they look back on 2026?

I know people round here will have lots of interesting theories.

Are the charts dead?

Is it the end of pop as we know it?

Or do you feel fine?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Edited June 3Jun 3 by HiyaLuv!

(Sorry this went long and rambling. I thought I had a support session today but I didn't, so you're stuck with me at my computer with nothing better to do today).

There are several underwhelming answers I can usually trot out to explain this. The simplest explanation is that it's a generally self-fulfilling curse. You quantify hits by chart activity, but the charts have been rigid in exactly how much space they have to give, meaning that one song or artist's pronounced success comes at the cost of another, but not in a way you will feel contented by. For instance, in 2009 for a single week, Rage Against the Machine and Joe McElderry amassed between them roughly ~1,000,000 sales. A monumental splash of activity that left as quickly as it came, giving that thrill of a big thing while not actually being a great disruption. I haven't checked the numbers exactly so I could be a little off (and we're looking at an arbitrary conversion between formats anyway), but if we look at "Rein Me In", that's a song whose dominance takes about 3-4 months to accumulate those same chart points. When you consider both the frivolity of that 2009 week, and the enormous reach required to amass those streams (if you want to talk about the legitimacy of streaming, that's another topic I don't have time for here), there's no doubt in my mind that it's a bigger overall thing. It probably just doesn't feel like it because we've watched it very slowly crawl up to this point moving on what feels like inertia but ultimately is newly generated streams day by day, week by week, and as a result, feels like a non-event when it just seems to hold the fort every week, more so for anyone who isn't entranced by the song to begin with. In fact, that's probably hurt just by this unassuming presentation, because if the song had instantly debuted at #1, we'd have to immediately consider it an event and treat it with that utmost, but for a lot of people it just seems to be that song that was haplessly stuck in the top 10 for so long dodging ACR and it's hard to shake off that 2025 perception with what it is now. As it is, the song continues to occupy the pinnacle chart real estate while in no way adding to the conversation on big hits going around.

I mainly think this is an important way to look at it because I think the micro-level actually is significant, but it can be missed for the trees if you just look at the chart. Basically, you have the consider an entire country (or world) of music fans and what all their individual behaviours look like together. What I suspect you find is that for many people, they're probably listening to a far wider spread of music than ever before. Maybe they're not paying as close attention to it (another topic), but the charts are raw data and that's all we've got. According to my own last.fm, back in 2011 I listened to just under 1,900 songs a total of 17,000 times between them. In 2026, I've listened to over 4,000 songs with only 6,600 plays together (I also listen to New Music Friday in full every week but don't log it, so those numbers are undershooting). When I spread my listening out that widely, it's just going to create a thin sheet of statistical noise that doesn't amount to anything, whereas if I hyper-focused on the same new hits as everyone else, I'd probably be adding to that idyllic chart performance where the songs rise up quickly as we discover them, and fizzle out when we get sick of them. Our attraction to this previously established format means that we disregard anything that goes against it. "Billie Jean" isn't new to me or you, but maybe it is to a lot of kids who grew up in a post-MJ world where most of his songs have never had so much attention put on them to be in focus before, giving no reason for them to be discovered in an endless pool of 'Songs that were important before you were born'. Does "Babydoll" by Dominic Fike feel like a fresh hit that happened this year because it never made the top 40 before? That song had over a billion streams on Spotify beforehand, they just didn't come at the same time, so it's not functionally a big difference to "Billie Jean". Let's say somewhere down the line, "Innerbloom" by RÜFÜS DU SOL becomes a massive chart hit. That song already feels monumentally rinsed to me because it is in every sense but the charts, but maybe what the song represents and its lack of chart credits will make it feel like a fresh discovery to chart watchers, the same way I've watched it happen in the past with songs like "Paper Planes", "Stolen Dance" & "ceilings". If this is all about specifically 2026 songs being in the chart and so none of my examples really count, then I apologise, though I don't think there's ever been a particular window of time when music consumers were strictly concerned with listening to songs that had come out in the current calendar year (though I'll admit I do it to a degree).

This is all just to say, anecdotally, when I talk to people who don't follow the charts but like music, I've never at one point come across any particular feeling of there being a missing space where the hits should be. I don't think it's how people look at it in the first place. Hits as we know it are sort of happy accidents that come with the territory of the chart presentation. Could the chart be fixed to better facilitate this? Maybe, but I'm always against the idea of trying too hard to force the triangle through the circle. If there's a problem to be had, it's that I have known people who make the charts their bible and very rarely explored outside of it. Those are always the first to cry foul at the state of the charts because it's actually disrupting their music discovery process, which has become so ingrained with this that they find difficulty connecting with music that hasn't earned its seat at the table by being a top x hit. I don't think the charts were ever there to replace music discovery but I understand it's hard to break out of that habit.

I suppose as well, part of the reason why I don't think it's the concern being made out is because the charts have a habit of making us miss the bigger picture, especially if we haven't ever shaken our perceptions of what it all means to not be on the chart. It feels like every week there's a comment (probably by the same handful of users) lamenting how there's so much new music out there and none of it is doing anything. I just want to say that it absolutely is doing something, but the charts are hard to crack. Ravyn Lenae's new song was released 5 days ago and has a million streams on Spotify. That's not enough to be on the charts, but it still means about 200,000 streams a day and I gotta say I'm pretty envious of anyone who can get that many eyes or ears on their work in a short space of time. We just have to get rid of that perception that if you don't crack the Spotify chart on the first day, you're doing 'nothing'. It's demonstrably untrue, and I'd love to welcome you to the world of the music I listen to that gets literal magnitudes less, but still feels important to me (I've probably linked it before, but this blog post of mine last year I think on some level, gets into the significance we can get from music, and it's a bonus if you've never heard of the artist mentioned in it).

If the charts are most important for showing the quirked up standout releases that are being promoted around, then they're probably not going to satisfy that to the same degree as in the past. I think they're still fundamentally important for their function of telling me every week what's most popular (although chart tinkering has gotten increasingly in the way of this lately). If the concern is over old songs being brought into SCR and not getting off, I just don't think that's ever been relevant. Mainly because they're a small fraction of it, but because otherwise those songs just are part of people's stories every day, it's just now that the OCC isn't hiding it where it can't be seen. Put "Rein Me In" on ACR and it's no longer the #1 song in the country, but very few people will take it out of rotation just because of that. Ultimately I think the OCC do realise these things and that's why they don't always rush to change the rules to satiate a vague spectre of 'good chart vibes'.

A large part of what gets attributed towards charts is playlist slop that a lot of people consume without even knowing what songs they are listening to. So charts being stale is a symptom of a general issue of people being too lazy or not having enough time to actually consciously consume music. And since everything is about streaming these days, there’s a lot of opportunities for companies like Shitify to swoop in and manipulate the stats and therefore charts.

I still think lack of ‘big’ releases recently is just a fluke. Many artists I love release music every single week, it’s just a matter of them being pushed down by the endless playlist crap that is shoved down our throats by streaming services everywhere. It’s also probably quite expensive to promote your song so only a certain caliber of pop artist can actually afford it on a global scale nowadays.

TikTok is also way too chaotic to play by the rules of new songs getting the priority. Later generations are not aware of many songs from before and with the nostalgia core being as popular as ever, we get ancient songs getting their second or third lives because of trends.

We just have to get rid of that perception that if you don't crack the Spotify chart on the first day, you're doing 'nothing'.

Well said by Dircadirca. Artists like Slayyyter for instance might be making big splash without ever touching the global or local charts because the big stars get so many streams by default on global scale. Most of the globally successful songs are more and more 'easy listening', something that people are not passionate about but still like them. The numbers don't lie in general popularity but they might lie in engagement.

That said, there are plenty of artists that SHOULD be able to reach the global Spotify chart at least for a day and it's worth discussing if they don't.

Also, no one has mentioned that maybe the labels are a bit lost with what type of music young people want to hear right now when 'anything' can be popular. At least I cannot point out clear musical trends of 2026.

Edited June 3Jun 3 by Sour Candy