On the charts, 2025 was a year that often felt like flipping TV channels to find a new episode to watch and coming across nothing but reruns. On our just-published year-end Hot 100 chart, 11 of the top 12 songs were released before 2025, and over half of them even hit their peak on the listing for the first time in 2024. So cluttered was the party with guests who arrived early and then wouldn’t leave that we changed the recurrent rules at Billboard to help clear some additional space for the future — but for 2025, the number of big hits that made a totally new impression felt unusually small.

But that also made the new big hits that we did get feel more special than ever — whether that was R&B veterans Ravyn Lenae and Kehlani experiencing long-overdue first true crossover moments, or newe

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