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Happy New Year and welcome to a special edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host Christopher Verdesi. Now usually on this show, we set our sights on a year in Pop history and count down the top ten hits based on the weekly charts published in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag. And as you might’ve guessed, as we get set to ring in 2026, we’re counting down the top ten from the year just passed.

So why call it a “special?” Why isn’t it just the 2025 edition of Chartcrush? Well that’s because the way we do our Chartcrush rankings, 2025 isn’t really over yet. We count every song’s entire chart run. Billboard, on the other hand, has a fixed eligibility window every year—a cut-off week for what it calls the “chart year.” For 2025, that cut-off was October 18. And the chart year began the week after the previous cut-off, October 26, 2024.

That system has always produced unexpected results—usually big hits ranking lower than they should, or missing the year-end charts entirely, only because their success straddled two calendar years. But this year, something really wild happened. Billboard‘s top four songs of 2024 all landed in the year-end top ten again in 2025.

Songs making the year-end top ten in back-to-back years: that’s only happened four times in the entire history of Billboard‘s year-end charts back to 1946: Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind ’97” and LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live,” both in 1997 and ’98; “Closer,” Chainsmokers and Halsey in 2016 and ’17; and The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” in 2020 and 2021.

I should also mention Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” which made Billboard‘s year-end top ten in 1960 and then again in 1962—but that was two completely separate chart runs. It vanished from the charts for nearly a year before roaring back to #1. We cover that whole saga in our Chartcrush 1962 episode if you’re interested.

So why are there suddenly four carry-overs from 2024 into ’25? The answer is what Billboard calls the “streaming loop”—platforms like Spotify and Apple Music continuously feeding listeners songs they’ve already played. Artists trying to break new records have another name for it: the “doom loop.”

With streaming now at 84% of music biz revenue, it’s also the biggest factor on the weekly charts. And radio only feeds the loop; stations won’t pull a top-ten hit from heavy rotation no matter how long it’s been around. The result? The four carry-over year-end top-ten hits from 2024 into ’25 averaged a whopping 86 weeks on the chart. For most of the 1960s and ’70s, the all-time record—think of this—was just 27 weeks.

Now to fix this, Billboard announced sweeping new changes to its “recurrency” rules in October. Long story short: songs that linger too long will now be ruthlessly removed from the Hot100, even if they’re still in the top ten in some cases!

And right on cue, also in October, Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl dropped, and on October 18, the last week of the 2025 chart year, all 12 of its songs took up the top 12 spots on the Hot100—a so-called “album bomb” that forced everything else down 12 or so notches and triggered the new rules for dozens of songs, including the last two of the four so-called 2024-25 “forever hits” still on the charts the week before.

So it’s a clean break for the 2026 chart year, but not without controversy. Back in May, even Billboard itself was offering grass-roots explanations for why hits were sticking around so long: listening habits formed during the Covid-19 pandemic favoring familiar “comfort food,” and a fragmented pop culture where consensus hits are rare—so when one appears, it stays massive longer. Not to mention the “Soft Life” movement and the backlash against hustle-and-grind culture gathering steam in the mid-2020s. More on that later.

So are Billboard‘s ultra-harsh new recurrency rules short-circuiting a legitimate cultural trend? Well the case can certainly be made, and if so, 2025—with its four carry-overs from 2024—will stand as the monument to that. But also its endpoint.

#13 Morgan Wallen – I’m the Problem

Now before we jump into Billboard‘s top ten, we’re going to kick off our Chartcrush 2025 New Years countdown with a couple bonus cuts, starting with Billboard‘s Artist of the Year, who’s only in the top ten as a Featured Artist—one of the four 2024-25 carry-over “forever hits” I’ve been talking about. That despite eight of his own songs from his album I’m the Problem cracking the top ten during the year—an all-time record for a single album.

The biggest was the title track, debuting at #2 in February and racking up 16 weeks in the top ten before exiting the chart in that fateful October 26 Taylor Swift album bomb bloodbath the same week the new recurrency rules went into effect. It’s Billboard‘s #13 song of 2025, Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem.”

Last year’s Billboard Artist of the Year Taylor Swift didn’t have a song in the top ten either. Weird!

The Voice season six castoff Morgan Wallen in 2025: no longer just Country’s biggest Star, more like its gravitational center, pulling Pop and even Hip-Hop into his orbit in the genre-bending 2020s.

Wallen’s continued surge, widely read as a giant Trump and MAGA-adjacent “F.U.” to the forces that tried to cancel him in 2021, first, for partying maskless in a bar at the height of Covid-19 pandemic hysteria—costing him a scheduled SNL appearance—and then, just months later, for casually dropping the forbiddenest of forbidden racial slurs referring to a drunk friend after a night out. That one got him yanked off radio, dropped by his agent, and indefinitely suspended by his label.

But fans rallied: anti-cancel culture “Enough Is Enough” billboards in downtown Nashville and a spike in Wallen’s streaming numbers so dramatic that even USA Today noticed. And fast forward to 2025, Morgan Wallen is Billboard‘s Artist of the Year and I’m the Problem: the #2 album of the year behind only Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl.

#25 HUNTR/X – Golden

Netflix in 2025 struck streaming gold with their Gen-Alpha-targeted cartoon fantasy K-Pop Demon Hunters about a K-Pop Girl Group—obviously fictional—who spend their time away from the lights and cameras battling demons, especially their rivals, secretly hell-spawned K-Pop Boy Band The Saja Boys.

If you haven’t noticed, pop culture imports from Korea—the “K” in “K-Pop”—surging in recent years. Demon Hunters, the most-watched Netflix original ever up to now, and throughout September, four hits from its soundtrack were in the top ten. The biggest is the second bonus cut in our 2025 Chartcrush New Year’s Special—six weeks at #1, and as of December 20, still in the top ten, even with the annual flood of holiday chart re-entries. So its run, far from over as we head into 2026. It’s cartoon Girl Group HUNTR/X with “Golden.”

“Golden,” fictional K-Pop Girl Group HUNTR/X from Netflix’s streaming blockbuster K-Pop Demon Hunters. “How It’s Done,” the other HUNTR/X song in the top ten at the peak of Demon Hunter mania in September, plus two other songs—”Soda Pop” and “Your Idol“—by the film’s demonic Boy Band, Saja Boys.

By far the biggest chart impact by any fictional cartoon Band in history, with apologies to The Gorillaz (with a “z”) from the early ’00s, The Archies “Sugar Sugar” from 1969, and Alvin and The Chipmunks.

#10 Chappell Roan – Pink Pony Club

Okay, so those are our two bonus cuts here on our 2025 Chartcrush New Years Special, both, by the way, likely to be in the top ten on our Chartcrush ranking after all is said and done and all the songs on the charts in 2025 have cleared out and we’re able to do our ranking based on full chart runs. Again, on this special, we’re counting down the top ten from Billboard‘s just-announced year-end Hot100.

And at #10, it’s last year’s Best New Artist, whose viral live performances, interviews and singalongs at Pride events over the Summer catapulted her beyond what Rolling Stone called in 2024 her “fierce, tightknit, largely queer fanbase” into the mainstream.

First released all the way back in 2019, the song debuted on the Hot100 weeks before her 2024 breakthrough “Good Luck, Babe” had even cracked the top ten, and it just lingered in the mid-regions of the Hot100 for months. But then she did it at the 2025 Grammys, and in the two weeks after in February, it jumped from #46 to #9, eventually peaking at #4 and staying in the top ten ’til the end of May. Billboard‘s #10 song of 2025 is Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.”

“Pink Pony Club,” Chappell Roan’s semi-autobiographical song about arriving in L.A. from the Midwest and finding her tribe—go-go dancers at a gay bar in West Hollywood. That bar, The Abbey, not The Pink Pony Club, but in interviews, Roan has mentioned various pink-themed—or at least pink-painted—strip clubs in Springfield, Missouri where she grew up that had her thinking pink writing the song.

Two new non-album Chappell Roan singles debuted in the top ten in 2025 but dropped like rocks, and it could be 2030 before we see her second album. “It took me five years to write the first one,” she told Vogue in August, “and it’s probably going to take at least five to write the next.”

#9 ROSÉ and Bruno Mars – Apt.

At #9, back to K-Pop, and the highest peaking Hot100 hit to date by a Female K‑Pop Solo Act, #3. It’s also the longest chart run for any K-Pop Act so far: 45 weeks. Now you could say that’s thanks to her Collaborator: Pop’s ultimate late ’10s/early ’20s Utility Player, the one and only Bruno Mars, but in the year of K-Pop Demon Hunters, who can really say for sure?

She found fame in the ’10s in BLACKPINK, the first Korean Girl Group to make it big in America, then signed with Atlantic Records as a Solo Act in ’21 and here’s her solo breakthrough: it’s ROSÉ “Apt.”

ROSÉ, “Apt.,” A-P-T period in print—a Romanized abbreviation of the Korean word for “apartment.” Also of course the English abbreviation for “apartment,” but us Yanks have never devised a drinking game involving stacked hands, a three-syllable rhythmic chant that fits Toni Basil’s 1982 New Wave hit “Mickey,” and apartment numbers. “Ah-pah-tuh,” the chant is really the title of the song, not “apartment.”

In addition to singing the second verse, Bruno Mars co-wrote, co-produced, and played drums on the track.

#8 Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen – I Had Some Help

At #8 on our Chartcrush New Years Special counting down the top ten from Billboard‘s just-announced year-end Hot100 for 2025, the first of the four “forever hits” I mentioned at the top of the show—songs that landed in Billboard‘s year-end top ten both in 2024 and 2025.

That can’t happen with our Chartcrush rankings. We calculate points for every song’s full chart run, and then we rank it in whichever calendar year it performed best. So year-straddling hits never fall through the cracks, but they also don’t get counted twice. Except “The Twist,” which, again, hit #1 in two separate chart runs nearly a year apart, 1960 and 1962. Hey, if that happens again, don’t worry, we’ll make another exception!

It was #4 in 2024, and now #8 in 2025: Post Malone featuring the breakout Country Superstar whose “I’m the Problem” we heard back in the bonus segment before we launched into the top ten, Morgan Wallen: a song with a similar “toxic but honest” thesis—”I Had Some Help.”

Post Malone had made his name in the late ’10s as a White Rapper, and for four straight years—2017 to 2020—he made Billboard‘s year-end top ten; twice in ’18 and ’19. On “I Had Some Help” he made his move into Country, and the timing of the collaboration mattered. Pairing up with Morgan Wallen didn’t just accelerate Posty’s genre pivot; it also fueled Wallen’s comeback arc from his early-2021 collision with peak Biden-era cancel culture. In hindsight the collab was less a surprise than a strategic inevitability, and they doubled down in 2025 with “I Ain’t Comin’ Back,” this time with Morgan Wallen the Headliner.

#7 Alex Warren – Ordinary

At #7 as we continue our special New Years countdown of Billboard‘s year-end top ten hits of 2025 announced December 9, it’s the year’s official Song of Summer. Yes, Billboard has a chart for that. But it may be the unlikeliest Summer Jam in recent memory: a Romantic Ballad by a TikTok Influencer—Influencer, not aspiring Pop Star—written for his wife—also a TikTok Influencer.

Not exactly beach party material, but when a song is #1 on the Hot100 for ten of the 14 weeks between Memorial and Labor Days and sweeps all 14 weeks on the Songs of Summer specialty chart, ya gotta give up the crown, right?

The Singer/Songwriter is a co-founder of The Hype House—a collective of full-time TikTok creators who shared a mansion in southern California and got so famous that Netflix built a reality show around them in 2022. His specialty was prank vids, but he also stood out for his candor about relationship drama and the messier emotional side of Influencer life, and that vulnerability carried over into his breakout hit, which debuted in February, cracked the top ten in April and hit #1 in June. Again, ten weeks on top and the year’s stamped ‘n certified Song of Summer. At #7 it’s Alex Warren’s “Ordinary.”

Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” a love song, yes, but its chorus also became the soundtrack for user vids pushing back against the hustle-and-grind culture that defined the last decade.

The so-called “Soft Life” movement in 2025 needed an anti-exhaustion anthem and “Ordinary” was it. And Alex Warren—ex–Hype House prankster turned chart-topper—became an unlikely avatar, proof that stepping back from the algorithmic grind of social media engagement could look less like giving up, and more like a healthy, overdue recalibration.

Folks didn’t just stream “Ordinary;” once they heard it they hit the heart button, added it to their personal libraries, and returned to it again and again—not always the case with big streaming hits.

#6 Benson Boone – Beautiful Things

At #6 as we count down Billboard‘s top ten songs of 2025 on a special New Years Chartcrush, the second of the four carry-over hits from 2024’s year-end top ten in Billboard. This one was last year’s #3 song, debuting in February 2024 and staying on the chart all the way to October 18, 2025, when those new recurrency rules—and Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl album bomb—sealed its fate.

89 weeks, though, including 43 in the top ten: not bad for a Singer who’d only gotten as high as #82 with any of his previous singles back to 2021.

At #6, the song Variety called a “sledgehammer ballad” for the way it starts out slow, and then—spoiler alert—a minute-and-a-half in, “whammo!” Here’s Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things.”

Benson Boone rode a wave of TikTok popularity first to an invited American Idol audition in 2021, then to a record deal with Imagine Dragons Frontman Dan Reynolds’ Night Street label under Warner Brothers, and eventually to a peak of #2 on the Hot100 with his “forever hit” “Beautiful Things”—#3 for 2024, and now #6 for 2025 as we count down Billboard‘s top ten for 2025 here on our New Years Chartcrush Special.

In June of ’25, Boone dropped his Springsteen-inspired, six-pack ab sportin’ second album American Heart and it debuted at #2 on the album chart, but its singles so far have fizzled just inside the top 20.

#5 Billie Eilish – Birds of a Feather

No such problem for our next Artist at #5, though. She’s had a steady stream of hit songs and albums since her whispery half-spoken vocals on her breakout hit “Bad Guy“—not to mention her brother Finneas’ ASMR-ish production flourishes—had everyone re-thinking Pop’s future in 2019. And on chart points, her song at #5 is her biggest hit yet: peaking at #2 for three weeks and notching 33 weeks in the top ten.

You could even say it too is a “forever hit” since it entered the chart all the way back in June of ’24. But unlike “I Had Some Help,” “Beautiful Things” and two more still to come in our 2025 countdown, this one didn’t make Billboard‘s year-end top ten last year. It was #15 in 2024—but it’s #5 for 2025. Here’s Billie Eilish, still a little whispery—that’s her trademark—but unmistakably singing, even belting out some high notes: “Birds of a Feather.”

“Birds of a Feather” was not initially promoted as a single from Billie Eilish’s third studio album Hit Me Hard and Soft but once the album dropped, after just three weeks it’d already quietly emerged as the album’s consensus favorite on the charts, not the provocative shock track “Lunch” that was the intended single. And it traveled well outside fandom and across playlists, radio formats, and demographics.

#4 Teddy Swims – Lose Control

At #4, the song that shattered the record for weeks on the Hot100 with 112 before Billboard yanked it after the last week of its 2025 chart year, October 18. Taylor Swift’s album bomb that week nudged it from #6 down to #17, and the very next week it was gone from the chart entirely for the first time in over two years. No telling how much longer it might have lingered without Billboard‘s intervention with its new, harsher recurrency rules.

It was Billboard‘s #1 song of 2024, and it spent most of 2025 still parked in the top ten, racking up enough points to land at #4 again this year. It’s Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control.”

“Is it Rock? Is it Pop? Is it R&B?” wondered writer Anna Chan in Billboard‘s 2024 year-end Staff Recap. The answer? It’s all three. How else could it have stuck around so long and become so ubiquitous in a pop culture as fragmented as ours in the mid-2020’s?

But much like Benson Boone at #6 with his 2024-25 carry-over forever hit “Beautiful Things,” no other Teddy Swims single has yet cracked the top 20—even with his new album in 2025, I’ve Tried Everything but Therapy (Part 2).

#3 Shaboozey – A Bar Song (Tipsy)

Now the Act with the fourth and final so-called “forever hit” in the countdown, though: one of his follow-up singles nearly did crack the top ten in 2025. “Good News” peaked at #12 August 30 as the “forever hit” that’s #3 in our countdown seemed to be finally winding down its 77-week chart run. And it topped the Country Airplay chart—which is good news indeed, possibly signaling a chart life beyond 2025 for the Artist.

It’s gonna be hard, though, to top his hit that was Billboard‘s #2 song of 2024. And now here it is again at #3 in our Chartcrush New Years countdown of Billboard‘s 2025 year-end top ten, the hit Pitchfork‘s Millan Verma called a new “elite drinking song.” “Play it at the club, honkytonk, or outside a Boomer’s toolshed,” he wrote. “Someone’s bound to fill a glass.” It’s Country/Hip-Hop crossover maestro Shaboozey with “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”

“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” at #3 here on our Chartcrush New Years Special counting down the top ten songs from Billboard‘s just-unveiled 2025 year-end Hot100. And it was #2 last year, with an amazing 19 weeks at #1 late in calendar 2024, which tied Lil Nas X’s record with “Old Town Road” set in 2019.

Just this month, though, even that record fell: as of the chart dated December 27, 2025, Mariah Carey’s holiday perennial “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has officially notched its 21st week at #1.

#2 Kendrick Lamar with SZA – Luther

Well okay, we’re all done with the 2024 repeats in the countdown. Thankfully our top two both indisputably belong to 2025. And they’re also both slower, contemplative songs that highlight a theme in the year’s top hits. Folks this year wanted to cozy up to their tunes, not have to shout over them, so they chose ease over intensity, emotional presence over performance, and longevity and familiarity over impact.

At #2, a song titled after legendary R&B/Soul Singer Luther Vandross that samples Vandross’ 1982 remake with Singer Cheryl Lynn, of the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell Duet “If This World Were Mine” from 1968.

And this is a Duet too—the year’s Top Rapper known for intensity, confrontation and big ideas, toning it down considerably on a Slow Jam with the year’s Top R&B Singer whose voice has been soundtracking vulnerability for over a decade.

As Rolling Stone put it, “Last year, Kendrick Lamar reminded us all how much fun it can be when he lets the hate flow through him” (a reference there to Kendrick’s blockbuster 2024 diss track “Not like Us“); “his biggest hit in 2025, though, was all about the love.” Here he is with SZA at #2, “Luther.”

“Luther” reminded Variety‘s Stephen J. Horowitz of the early ’00s “when an R&B hook rarely felt out of place on a Rap song and vice versa.” Kendrick Lamar and SZA have charted four collaborations in the past year—shaping up as a modern-day Marvin and Tammi.

#1 Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars – Die with a Smile

Well okay, we’re down to #1 on our Chartcrush New Years Special counting down Billboard‘s top ten hits of 2025. And if you’ve been trying to suss out a theme this year—in forever hits, Alex Warren, Billie Eilish and even Kendrick and SZA—#1 ought to crystallize it for you. I’ve already roughed it out talking about the so-called “Soft Life” movement, a backlash against hustle-culture and algorithmic tyranny for people who live online—and, let’s be honest, that’s almost everybody now, right?

It’s a Duet by two Pop Heavyweights, and we’ve already heard one in the countdown—his pairing with K-Pop star ROSÉ on “Apt.”—making him the only Artist with two hits in Billboard‘s year-end top ten for 2025—albeit both as a Collaborator. But that’s a role he seems especially at home with in this phase of his career, having racked up eight #1s since 2010.

And in recording the song, the two Artists looked back to ’70s Singer-Songwriters—another era when exhausted listeners were craving warmth, intimacy and companionship. Well, what could be more anti-hustle than a song about staying together and smiling through the apocalypse? At #1, it’s Lady Gaga and again, Bruno Mars, “Die with a Smile.”

Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars on Billboard‘s #1 song of 2025, “Die with a Smile”—two Artists who’ve built entire careers on spectacle, choosing restraint, humility and sincerity. And if there’s a single thread tying together 2025’s biggest hits, it’s that: in an exhausted, over-optimized culture, the music that lasted wasn’t demanding attention—it was offering solace.

And on that note, as the clock ticks us into 2026 here in a few days, hours, minutes or seconds—depending on when exactly you’re listening to our special Chartcrush New Year’s countdown of Billboard‘s top ten for 2025—I hope you’ve enjoyed our first draft look at the year just passed.

I’m Christopher Verdesi, Creator and Host of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and as always I want to thank you for listening. On our website at chartcrush.com you’ll find a written transcript and a link to stream the podcast version of the show you just heard, plus all our regular episodes, each counting down the top ten hits of a different year. And you’ll also find plenty of other fun and informative goodies. Again, that website: chartcrush.com. Check in and leave a comment if you like, and be sure and tune in again next week for another edition of Chartcrush.

Happy New Year, folks!

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