Welcome to Stems, a weekly newsletter on music, media, and tech written by Nathan Brackett, former editor at Rolling Stone and content exec at Amazon Music. Subscribe here for free to get every new issue in your inbox every Friday.
Who’s Winning and Who’s Losing After the YouTube/Billboard Break Up?
Move over K-Pop Demon Hunter fans - all of your YouTube streaming is for naught.
As most Stems readers know, in mid-January YouTube pulled their music video data from the Billboard charts following a dispute over how views should be counted. The change created immediate music biz ripple effects, including a sneaky-smart release strategy from Taylor Swift for her video for “Opalite.”
What hasn’t gotten as much attention: exactly how much has the Billboard Hot 100 changed since the shift? More music gets streamed on YouTube than on Spotify, Apple Music and umpteen other streamers combined; what happens when all of a sudden all that doesn’t count toward the top of the charts?
Billboard has an abstruse formula for weighting all the different ways people listen – paid streams, terrestrial radio plays, ‘free’ plays, paid downloads, player piano, etc. So it’s going to be impossible to figure out exactly what the charts would look like in an alternative universe where Lyor Cohen and the Penske Media-owned publication were still friends. (We’d have a shot at reverse engineering this but the Stems data insights crew got stranded in Dubai on their annual team offsite.)
What we can do is offer directional examples of the kinds of songs that will be penalized or benefit in the post-YouTube Billboard world. To do this, we tracked the top 20 songs on both the Billboard Hot 100 and YouTube music charts over four weeks (Feb 7-Mar 12).
Some artists, like Bad Bunny and Alex Warren, do equally well on the YouTube and Billboard top 20. But not the artists below. The following artists are getting millions of streams on YouTube without getting comparable chart positions on the Hot 100. The higher up the artist is, the bigger the disconnect between YouTube and Billboard:
All of the above are hip-hop, Latin or K-Pop artists — genres well known for driving outsize YouTube streams, a fact that will become even more pronounced now. Fuerza Regida, Herencia De Grandes and Lenin Remirez are Regional Mexican artists — a genre that will likely be taking one of the biggest hits. Also dropping will be viral hits like T.I.’s late-career banger “Let ‘Em Know,” which has had a surprising run thanks to TikTok. Another swath of affected songs will be tween-friendly pop like Ice Spice’s SpongeBob Squarepants song “Big Guy,” and phenomena like the ongoing K-Pop Demon Hunters juggernaut.
On the other side of the divide are these top 20 Hot 100 artists, whose Billboard top of the pops spots are outpacing their YouTube chart positions. The higher their spot below, the bigger the gap between their Billboard position and their YouTube streams:
Judging from this, the artists benefiting from the charts change will tend to be more pop (Taylor Swift), more country (Ella Langley, Luke Combs), more Adult Contemporary (Olivia Dean, Raye) more folk-rock-y (Noah Kahan) — broadly speaking, music with older and whiter fanbases compared to YouTube. Country music’s peculiar traits — fans who are still downloading iTunes songs and paying for physical music, combined with a resilient terrestrial radio ecosystem — will all count even more toward higher chart positions. (It’s worth keeping that in mind the next time you see a “country music rising” trend piece based on the Billboard charts — the genre’s growth is real, but there is also some accounting at play.)
We are sympathetic to Billboard’s position with YouTube, who, according to Irving Azoff, are bullies at the negotiating table. (Game recognizes game!) The question is, when does the legitimate desire to track how artists make money — which drives Billboard’s weighting system — start to interfere with tracking what people are actually listening to? An extreme example of weighting having an outsize impact on chart position is alt-country iconoclast Sturgill Simpson’s surprising #3 album this week achieved by selling 59,000 physical vinyl albums and CD’s in his first week. We are Sturgill fans, but is 59,000 albums a number that should put him at close to the top of the music biz? Do we want the charts to measure what amounts to sales hacks — or measure what’s actually happening?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this; email me at [email protected]
“Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is a Dutiful Look at the Band’s ‘80s Chaos
The first thing I heard about Netflix’s The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother Hillel was the band distancing itself from it, which naturally made me curious to see it. It seems like the band was more upset about the marketing than anything in the movie, though: the Variety piece announcing the film made it sound like an official Red Hot Chili Peppers documentary, which compelled them to say that it was not, in fact, Chili Peppers IP. Otherwise, the most surprising thing about Rise itself is the fact that the fillmakers use AI to simulate the late Hillel Slovak’s voice. Such is the state of music documentaries in 2026.
The doc, directed by Ben Feldman, tells the story of the band’s early years as it pays tribute to late guitarist Slovak, who died from a heroin overdose in 1988. It does a decent job of portraying him as the sensitive, sometimes ambivalent artistic spirit of the band’s early days. The Chili Peppers have always risen or fallen with their guitarists; the film makes a strong case that Slovak set the template for musical success for them, even as he epitomized their early dysfunction and addiction in real time.
The 1980s Chili Peppers could be an unholy mess. I saw them in April 1988 playing a 1200-capacity club called Headliners in Madison, WI, a few months before Slovak’s death. He was a spectral figure onstage who seemed happy to hide behind Anthony Kiedis and Flea’s bro-ey wildman theatrics. They weren’t even the best band onstage that night (that was Fishbone) but they were still undeniable. The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers captures the energy and darkness of that era, even as it straddles the line between band-doc and personal tale of addiction; authorized and unauthorized; bonfire and dumpster fire.
What saved the band was that Kiedis and Flea wouldn’t let it go. “For whatever reason, Flea and I have this never-say-quit attitude,” says Kiedis. We see them soldier on through multiple addictions, departing drummers, pissed-off producers, genuine tragedy — only to emerge, following Slovak’s death, recording their best work and becoming bigger than ever. As the line in “Can’t Stop” goes: “Complete the motion if you stumble.”
The World’s Finest Music-Themed Mini Crossword: Blog-Era Rap Special
This happened, Clipse fans.
Like a buffering MP3 download from Nah Right in 2008, this one might take an extra minute.
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Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: /in/nbrackett
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