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MUSIC • MEDIA • TECH| Analysis |
Six Months Since YouTube and Billboard Broke Up, Their Charts Are Looking as Segregated as Ever
Pay no attention to that rapper at #1: Youngboy Never Broke Again has had more than 100M YouTube plays in 2026 and is #1 on the YouTube artist chart, but nowhere to be found on the Billboard Artist 100. (Giphy)
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: