The charts were stagnant. The hits wouldn’t die. So Billboard finally called the bouncer.
I bet one thing many of us DJs have in common is running the control board for Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. Based for most of its run on the Billboard Hot 100, the program was a weekend go-to for those who followed the trajectory of American popular music like us Detroit Tiger fans followed Al Kaline’s batting average.
For the better part of the 21st century, the Hot 100 has felt less like a snapshot of the zeitgeist and more like a hostage situation. The chart was once designed with the ruthless efficiency of a shark tank: songs swam up, feasted, and were swiftly devoured by the next big thing. But lately? The shark tank has turned into a nursing home. Songs aren’t just lingering; they’re taking up permanent residence, clinging to the upper atmosphere with the tenacity of a tenant who changed the locks on the landlord.
This fall, Billboard finally grabbed the crowbar.
Beginning with the chart dated October 25, 2025, the magazine quietly rolled out a new set of regulations that function less like chart methodology and more like compulsory retirement. Call it the “Get Off My Lawn” policy. The rules are a masterclass in actuarial brutality: If a song has been hanging around for 20 weeks and slips below No. 50, it’s gone. Twenty-six weeks below No. 25? You’re out. And in the most draconian twist, if a track spent 78 weeks on the chart and drops below No. 5—a rule that feels personally drafted to assassinate specific unkillable hits—it is summarily executed.
Longevity used to be a badge of honor. Now, it’s grounds for eviction.
The bloodletting was immediate. The first casualty was Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control,” a soulful barnacle of a track that had survived 119 weeks on the chart with the cockroach-like resilience of a nuclear survivor. Under the new regime, it vanished overnight. It was joined in exile by Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” and the Lady Gaga/Bruno Mars power ballad “Die With a Smile,” alongside a handful of unkillable staples from Morgan Wallen and Kendrick Lamar. It was a chart-wide gentrification effort: the old guard was swept out to make room for the new tenants.
If you’re prone to tin-foil-hattery, the timing feels suspicious. That 78-week rule for songs dropping out of the top five seemed practically laser-guided for “Lose Control,” which was happily camping out at No. 6 until a Taylor Swift album bomb clogged the traffic lanes and pushed it into the kill zone.
But to understand why this matters, you must remember what the Hot 100 actually is. We treat it like a mirror reflecting “what America loves,” but it’s really an industrial ledger. It’s the scoreboard record executives use to justify their bonuses and allocate their marketing spend. And when the scoreboard stops moving, the industry gets nervous.
For years, the blame for this stagnation was placed squarely on the shoulders of streaming. The logic went that in the Spotify era, we listen to the same playlists on an infinite loop, creating a “sticky” ecosystem where hits calcify. But that theory, while tidy, misses the real villain in the room.
The culprit isn’t the algorithm. It’s the radio.
Look at the autopsy reports of the songs Billboard just purged. These weren’t just streaming darlings; they were the unkillable gods of terrestrial radio. These are the songs that haunt us in the grocery store produce aisle, the tracks that vibrate through the floorboards of our dentist’s office, the sonic wallpaper of the American commute. In the week before the purge, seven of the eight exiled tracks were being propped up largely by massive radio airplay, even as their streaming numbers dwindled.
Herein lies the irony of the modern music business: A chart supposedly revolutionized by digital streaming is being held hostage by the last great analog medium. Radio is risk-averse by design. It loves familiarity. It nurtures the slow burn. It is the great preserver of the status quo.
Billboard’s new policy is an admission that the “natural” churn of the market is broken. In an era where Taylor Swift can drop a dozen tracks into the Top 10 in a single afternoon, the lethargic pace of traditional radio just can’t keep up with the speed of culture. The chart had become a waiting room where nobody was being called back.
So, the powers that be have intervened, imposing a kind of temporal discipline on our listening habits. They are making a value judgment: You have listened to this song enough. Move on.
Where was this rule when we were enduring Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” or “Shannon” by Henry Gross? Over played earworms like “The Night Chicago Died,” and “Run, Joey Run” have not age well. While I keep them all in the Keener13.com vaults, I’ll only trot them out if a listener writes to us and makes a good case for risking a button push from the floating fingers and micro-attention spans.
Whether this new Billboard forced rotation restores the Hot 100’s dynamism or just alienates listeners who actually like hearing the same song for two years remains to be seen. But for now, the message is clear. In the age of infinite choice, Billboard has decided that even a smash hit eventually overstays its welcome. The party is over. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay on the charts.
