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What happened on the October 25, 2025 chart?
Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther” fell to No. 38 in its 46th week and left the chart as a recurrent song. The highest-ranking rap song that week was YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Shot Callin,” at No. 44. Billboard classified rap songs for its report by their eligibility for its Hot Rap Songs chart. Billboard Canada’s republication of Billboard’s report gives the chart positions and classification.
Billboard also reported that the November 1 chart had no rap song in its top 40, with “Shot Callin” at No. 43. Those are the two consecutive chart weeks documented in its coverage; they do not establish what happened on later charts.
When had this happened before?
Billboard identified February 2, 1990, as the previous week when the Hot 100 top 40 contained no rap song. Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” was at No. 41 that week, then rose to No. 29 the following week. Billboard described the ensuing stretch of rap songs in the top 40 as lasting 35 years, eight months and three weeks.
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Why did the top 40 have no rap songs?
Billboard described several contributing circumstances, not one definitive cause. A recurrent-song rule change removed long-running songs that had fallen below specified positions. Under the rule described in its report, a song could go recurrent after more than 26 weeks if it fell below No. 25. “Luther,” then in its 46th week, had fallen to No. 38.
Seven other songs in the top 40 also went recurrent that week, opening places for lower-ranked songs to move up. Billboard said the rap songs on the chart were not close enough to enter those available positions. In the preceding three weeks, Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl had all 12 of its songs in the top 40, adding to the crowded field.
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Billboard also pointed to a broader decline in hip-hop’s reported share of the music market. It cited hip-hop’s share as nearly 30% in 2020, just over 25% in 2023, and 24% through the week of October 23, 2025. These are figures reported by Billboard, not an independently audited dataset in the sources available here. Market share measures hip-hop’s portion of the broader market; it is not the same as the number of rap songs in a particular Hot 100 top 40.
Billboard’s historical comparison also counted songs according to eligibility for its Hot Rap Songs listing. That attribution matters for hybrid or disputed genre cases: the report’s category is Billboard’s chart classification, not a universal judgment about how every listener would label a song.
How should the 1990 comparison be understood?
The dates and rankings describe Billboard chart results, but the way the chart measures popularity has evolved. The Atlantic notes that Billboard broadened retail-single eligibility in 1998, incorporated digital sales in the early 2000s, and later saw streaming transform chart inputs and behavior. So “first time since 1990” is a meaningful comparison of the published Hot 100’s top 40 across those years, not a claim that the underlying measurement system stayed unchanged.
The distinction is useful: the October 2025 chart establishes that no qualifying rap song ranked in the top 40 under that week’s Hot 100 rules. It cannot, by itself, show that listeners stopped consuming rap, explain every cause of the genre’s changing market share, or predict what later charts would show.
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