Two Charts, Two Musical Universes: Billboard vs. YouTube Six Months In

Welcome to Stems! We hope your summer is going like the World Cup Final halftime show, full of Muppets, BTS and Brazilian soccer legends driving ATV’s. Send feedback, tips, and pdfs of industry reports to [email protected].

A few months ago, Stems dug into the differences between the top artists on the Billboard and YouTube charts in the wake of Lyor Cohen pulling his data from the Hot 100. We saw that the Billboard Hot 100 was heavily underindexing in hip-hop, international artists and (especially) Latin artists — attributable, at least in part, to the fact it wasn’t getting YouTube data anymore.

It’s now been six months since the divorce, and the disconnect between the two companies’ charts looks as wide as ever. We did a spot check of the US top artist charts on Billboard and YouTube for the week of July 10th-16th. Unlike last time, we didn’t measure the differences in chart positions (although there were many — Shakira, for one, was 70 places lower on Billboard than YouTube, where she was at #20). Instead, to keep it simple, we just made a list of artists who didn’t rank at all on one chart — i.e., didn’t make the top 100 artists — but did make it onto the Top 20 of the other. The results were pretty dramatic:

To be clear, there are always going to be differences between the Billboard and YouTube artist charts. Billboard has a formula that takes into account things like digital track sales and radio play; for understandable reasons, it gives extra weight to listening that people are paying for, like paid streams (i.e. streams from paid Spotify or Apple Music subscribers). And YouTube is always going to favor younger, video-leaning artists, like the late Oliver Tree (RIP), which is one reason it has historically tilted in favor of hip-hop and Latin artists.

But the fact that the #1 artist on YouTube, Youngboy Never Broke Again, a rapper who has chalked up north of 100M plays in 2026, isn’t on the Billboard artist chart at all seems like a real problem. The same goes for the absence of Mexican superstars Peso Pluma and Fuerza Regida, who are #8 and #5 on YouTube respectively. On the flip side, you have artists who might not have close to the same number of people streaming their music, but who are cracking the Billboard charts by leveraging the enthusiasm of superfans to take advantage of accounting quirks. K-Pop singer Yeonjun of the group Tomorrow X Together made it to number 17 on the Billboard artist chart with a strategy that goosed album sales, including releasing ‘mini-albums’ (which just barely clear the Recording Academy’s 15-minute-long threshold for what Grammy classifies as an album) in multiple, slightly-different editions in the hopes that fans will purchase every version. Veteran rockers like the Rolling Stones and My Chemical Romance may not be pulling strategic levers in the same way but are benefiting from the same bookkeeping, making it onto the upper reaches of the Billboard artist charts with first week album sales in the estimated five figures.

Billboard isn’t responsible for the split with YouTube — the streaming giant left them. But this moment does reflect a longstanding tension beneath the charts: are they measuring mass listening, or dollars? It’s a tension has only gotten more pronounced in the age of streaming, when the gap between how many people are listening and what artists are making seem bigger than ever, and many fans buy albums as a totem or sign of support — something closer to merch — rather than something to play. Billboard has built complicated formulas assigning value to every form of consumption to feed into their primary charts, which are trying to be everything for everybody. But in a perfect world, we might make a cleaner distinction, and have charts that measured one thing or the other: how many people are listening, or what artists are making. (Think of Pollstar and concert attendance vs. concert grosses for an analogy.) In the meantime, though, it feels like our picture of the top of the pops is getting muddier — and if Billboard wants to claim to reflect the totality of popular music with its charts, it seems incumbent on them to figure out a solution.

Last night we visited just-opened Midtown jazz club The Pocket to see Arturo O’Farrill and his orchestra play the Lord’s music (afro-latin jazz) and show off some of the good work his nonprofit organization, Belongó, has been doing. The Pocket, which opened in June, still has a new-club feel but O’Farrill (son of legendary bandleader Chico O’Farrill) and his band are doing their best to wear it in; they have a Tuesday residency, and the formidable Mingus Big Band play every Monday. Belongó supports music education, and opening act the Fat Cats was their proof of concept: a killer foursome of teens, all of whom benefit from Belongó's free instrumental training programs in NYC public schools (both me and my buddy Charles gasped when the awesome drummer stood up at the end of the set and we saw that he was a cherubic 14 years old). O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra are a band that can blow your wig back — 18 virtuosos able to deliver expansive pieces like O’Farrill’s four-part “Afro Latin Jazz Suite,” which had some near-Love Supreme like moments, but also able to settle into a mighty groove on songs like the closer, Machito’s “Mambo America.” Not the night I would have expected in a club a half a block off Times Square, and well worth a visit.

Morning Brew delivers the biggest stories in business, finance, and tech in about 5 minutes — with just enough personality to keep things interesting.

Join 4,000,000+ professionals who start their mornings a little smarter.

Check it out