Taylor Swift stays at No. 1, and foils Ye in the process

This week’s look at the pop charts brings another week at No. 1 for Taylor Swift’s indomitable The Tortured Poets Department, whose sales have surged thanks to a flurry of discount-priced digital variants. Those efforts just happened to hold Swift nemesis Ye (formerly Kanye West, formerly a chart-topper) out of No. 1 — a coincidence, no doubt. Elsewhere, the Top 5 songs remain exactly the same, the race for song of the summer enters its final laps, and Chappell Roan keeps creeping up the chart nearly a year after the release of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.

TOP ALBUMS

Nearly four months after the arrival of The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift is still setting personal records — and settling a few scores.

The album sits at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for the 14th nonconsecutive week, and it’s experienced a sudden surge of sales growth — a 606% increase from the previous week, as it happens — thanks to an assortment of newly released, discount-priced digital versions containing bonus tracks. The flood of alternate TTPD editions, as well as discounted physical variants available via Swift’s web store, just happened to coincide with the release of a new album from the singer’s longtime nemesis, Ye (aka Kanye West) and rapper Ty Dolla $ign. Aided by its own wave of variants and discounts, Vultures 2 enters this week’s chart, appropriately enough on several levels, at No. 2.

Swift’s move to goose her album’s chart performance isn’t especially novel, given that many artists deploy similar strategies to extend a hit album or song’s chart run. For major stars, such moves generally provide a significant, if fleeting, boost. And, given the heavyweight albums that are about to drop, The Tortured Poets Department’s run at the top of the Billboard 200 seems likely to end soon enough: Post Malone’s album of country duets, F-1 Trillion, drops Friday, while Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet arrives a week later.

It’s a reasonably safe guess that Swift, ever the strategist, might not put together quite so much effort to block either of those records from Billboard’s top spot.

Elsewhere on the albums chart, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess climbs from No. 4 to No. 3 — a new peak that roughly coincides with the singer’s much-chronicled Lollapalooza appearance earlier this month. Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time drops from No. 2 to No. 4, while Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft stays at No. 5.

Speaking of Eilish, her guest appearance on Charli XCX’s new remix of “Guess” has helped XCX’s Brat climb from No. 9 to No. 6. Zach Bryan’s The Great American Bar Scene tumbles from No. 3 to No. 7; Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album — from January 2021! — re-enters the Top 10 by zipping from No. 11 to No. 8; Noah Kahan’s Stick Season climbs from No. 10 to No. 9; and the Twisters soundtrack dips from No. 8 to No. 10.

TOP SONGS

For yet another week, the songs chart remains eerily static — an indication, in case you needed one, that this year’s “song of the summer” sweepstakes have pretty well boiled down to two songs. The first is this week’s Hot 100 champ: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which holds at No. 1 for a fourth straight week (and fifth overall). Heading into the final weeks of the season, it’s got every conceivable metric working in its favor: It’s the top-streaming song, the top-selling song and the song pulling the most radio airplay. In fact, it’s the first song to top all three of those Billboard charts simultaneously since Adele’s “Easy On Me” in 2021. In other words, it’s a big, big hit.

The runner-up to “A Bar Song” this week is its only competition for the seasonal crown: Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help,” featuring the help of Morgan Wallen, holds at No. 2 this week. But that song dominated early summertime, with six weeks at No. 1 — the most of any song in 2024, at least so far.

Then, elsewhere in the Top 5… Well, the entire Top 5 remains the exact same as last week. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” holds steady at No. 3, followed by Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby.” The chart’s first mover, hitting a new peak by rising from No. 8 to No. 6, is Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” It’s followed by another rising song, Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” which also hits a new peak, climbing from No. 10 to No. 7.

Familiar songs round out the Top 10, as they so often have in recent weeks: Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” creeps up from No. 9 to No. 6, Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” drops from No. 6 to No. 9 (nice), and Hozier’s “Too Sweet” takes a similar plunge from No. 7 to No. 10.

WORTH NOTING

Looking at the songs chart, you might be wondering… Uh, where are all the new songs? Well, the remainder of the Hot 100 offers a few clues as to what might crack the Top 10 once a few of the old standbys start to fade. (Seriously, people have to get sick of “Lose Control” and “Too Sweet” eventually.)

One answer, unsurprisingly, is country music. Post Malone is about to drop F-1 Trillion, which is bound to boost a bunch of its songs in the weeks and months to come, while his collaborator, Wallen, has tracks at No. 13 (“Cowgirls,” featuring ERNEST) and No. 15 (“Lies Lies Lies”) this week. Luke Combs, whose Malone duet, “Guy For That,” debuted in the Top 20 last week, sits at No. 14 with his Twisters jam, “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma,” while Zach Bryan’s songs and albums continue to dot the Billboard charts.

Another answer lies with the aforementioned Chappell Roan, whose Lollapalooza-sparked surge has her hitting new milestones left and right. The singer now has a personal-best seven songs on this week’s Hot 100, and all of them are climbing — six of them to new chart peaks. At No. 6, “Good Luck, Babe!” is joined by “Hot To Go!” (which leaps from No. 26 to No. 17), “Pink Pony Club” (No. 42 to No. 29), “Red Wine Supernova” (No. 52 to No. 47), “Casual” (No. 76 to No. 62), “Femininomenon” (No. 86 to No. 70) and now “My Kink is Karma,” first released as a single in May 2022, which finally debuts on the chart at No. 91.

Oh, and there are two other Hot 100 song debuts worth noting: 1) Charli XCX’s “Guess” remix with Billie Eilish enters this week’s chart at No. 12; and 2) *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” re-enters the Hot 100 at No. 45. Deadpool & Wolverine, it turns out, has long coattails.