← All guides

The charts

Why your song slipped, and what it takes to stay up there.

Guide 06 · 3 min read

An artist on a stadium runway, the crowd lit gold to the back of the stands
Somebody is number one right now The charts

There is a Hot 100 and a chart for each of the five genres. They all recalculate every six hours, and every artist above you is a real person.

Pop
Rock
Rap
Country
EDM
Five genre charts, and the Hot 100 over the top of them

A genre shares one audience

Your song does not have a score that quietly drains away. Every song competing in a genre is sharing the attention available, and your position is your slice of it.

So nothing pushes your song down except better songs. A track from six weeks ago holds its place until somebody beats it, and the same track can drop hard in a week when three people all release something stronger.

Release day is loud

A new song gets a burst of attention when it lands, and that fades over the next few days back to what the song is really worth. It is a splash, not a plan. What it is good for is timing: a quiet week gives a song you are proud of a much better start.

Watch your genre chart

You compete for attention inside your genre, not against the whole game, so being a name in your genre is reachable in a first season. The Hot 100 is a longer project.

Staying up there

Holding the top takes a catalogue, not a single. One enormous song puts you at number one until somebody beats it. A run of good songs keeps you there, because now they have to beat all of them at once.