With just under four months left in 2024, there have already been more hip-hop songs to top Billboard‘s Hot 100 Songs (and as many rap albums on the 200 albums chart) than in all of 2023, the sign of a resurgent year for the most popular genre in the country.
And while younger artists like Ice Spice and Latto have generated huge buzz, it’s the older rappers who carried the genre’s chart dominance in the 2010s (or earlier) that are mainly responsible for the chart-toppers this year.
Kendrick Lamar (37) had one of the biggest songs of the summer with “Not Like Us,” Future (40) and Metro Boomin (31) secured two Number One albums just two weeks apart this spring, and 21 Savage (31) earned his first solo Number One album in six years with American Dream. Travis Scott (33), meanwhile, was less than 1,000 units away from his fourth consecutive Number One album with the official release of beloved 10-year-old mixtape Days Before Rodeo, taking the best sales week for a rap album in 2024 in the process.
Rap’s elder statesman Eminem (51) earned his tenth consecutive chart-topping album with The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), his first album in four years. And even though he’s now distanced from much of the mainstream music industry, Kanye West (47) got his 11th Number One album for his Ty Dolla $ign Collab Vultures 1, and his fifth Number One single with “Carnival.”
There have been a couple number ones from artists whose major debuts were released in the last five years: Jack Harlow’s “Lovin’ On Me” spent three weeks atop the Hot 100 earlier this year, and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hiss” went Number One in February. Still, the data is irrefutable: fewer newer hip-hop artists topped the charts this year than at the beginning of the streaming era in the mid-to-late 2010s.
And as several hip-hop executives tell Rolling Stone, that may not be a coincidence. “One of the conversations I keep having with people is that audiences are a lot more fragmented now, and it’s a lot harder for artists to drop a piece of music and feel like they have the attention of an entire genre,” says Carl Chery, head of urban music and creative director at Spotify.
“It feels like we’re all in our own respective little bubbles,” he adds. “There’s an ongoing conversation about the death of monoculture, and when the pandemic happened I think it further pushed the fragmentation for artists. When you look at Kendrick and the battle [with Drake], or Future or Kanye or Eminem, they all precede this era in a way and come from monoculture. They’ve laid the groundwork to have significant fanbases they can activate when they put out new music, and that’s harder for artists who’ve emerged in the past three or four years.”
Ezekiel Lewis, president of Epic Records — record label for Savage, Future and Scott — agrees, emphasizing the sheer volume of daily content released online. (Some executives have estimated as many as 100,000 tracks get uploaded to Spotify each day.)
“The music market is increasingly saturated,” Lewis says. “There’s a growing number of indie companies, we have more music entering the market than ever. [Savage, Scott and Future] are the creme de la creme of hip-hop, and they’re a part of the pop culture zeitgeist. Obviously their stories and their music remain very relevant to the audience.”
Another potential contributor is that other genres have started to catch up in the streaming era. Hip-hop was one of the first genres to fully embrace streaming, giving it an edge on the charts with fans repeatedly streaming songs. But other genres are now booming, with Latin and country enjoying notable streaming hikes in recent years.
As Rolling Stone previously reported, at the mid-point of 2023, just three of the top 25 hip-hop albums of the year had actually come out in 2023, according to data from Luminate. That’s a stark dip compared to 2018, when 13 albums from that year made the mark. Looking at Luminate’s midyear numbers for 2024, the figure doubled to six, and that doesn’t include Death of Slim Shady — which dropped in July. (That also doesn’t include Days Before Rodeo, which saw its chart debut two weeks ago, hitting streaming services 10 years after its original release.)
But the numbers still show a continued decline outside of the top 25. At the midyear point last year, hip-hop accounted for 70 of the top 200 best-performing albums in the U.S., a drop from 85 the year prior. That’s fallen even further to 61 this year. Country, meanwhile, rose from 21 of the top 200 last year to 30.
Music insiders note the industry’s cyclical nature, with several executives pointing toward industry chatter from last year about a drought of new pop stars after Olivia Rodrigo first broke out in 2021. Those talking points have cooled some as young artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have ascended to pop superstardom, while Charli XCX has enjoyed a career boost with her Brat summer.
“We felt the same way about pop 18 months ago, and then came the brilliant songs from Sabrina Carpenter, those things cut through,” Lewis says. “You can’t discount artist development either. She’s been developed over a significant period of time and reached a pinnacle at this point. When the music meets the tenure of artist development, when you’re lucky enough, you get rewarded.”
Larry Jackson, founder of the indie music company Gamma, agrees. Among Gamma’s artists are established superstars like Usher, as well as younger signees like Sexxy Red — one of rap’s most promising younger acts.
“It takes time, and I think we’re seeing the next batch of artists starting to creep up right now,” Jackson says. “I think you’ve got to be patient with letting artists develop. It’s not just about signing someone off a quick hit on TikTok. It’s easy for fans or labels to get impatient when these viral moments become the new normal. Of course you love big plays and touchdowns but that’s not what happens each play. As long as you’re moving one yard down the field every day, [you’ll] still make it to the end zone.”
Every exec who spoke to Rolling Stone refuted the notion that rap was facing any significant headwinds going forward. Lewis says that at most “maybe hip-hop just needs a bit of a rejig.” The best music, he says, will continue to stick. “It’s incumbent on artists to put their best foot forward and have the most potent music possible to break through,” Lewis says.
And of course there’s still promise among the younger crop. Bossman Dlow cracked the Top 25 rap albums in the midyear report with Mr. Beat The Road, which hit 23. BigXthaplug, meanwhile, has two projects sitting in the top 40 with AMAR and The Biggest. Tommy Richman went from obscurity to having one of the year’s biggest songs with “Million Dollar Baby,” which straddles the line between R&B and hip-hop.
Among the most exciting trends is how women could be carrying the genre’s future. Some of the most talked about young rappers include Ice Spice, Glorilla, Sexxy Red and Latto. Glorilla’s Ehhthang Ehhthang was the biggest rap album from a woman released in 2024 at the mid-year with about 297,000 units.
Chery himself notes many of those aforementioned artists as success stories, but further says he hasn’t seen a more major chart breakthrough in hip-hop since the likes of Juice Wrld, Roddy Ricch and Pop Smoke in the late 2010s and 2020. Still, he doesn’t think hip-hop has plateaued.
“I think we’re just waiting for that next artist to break through that ceiling,” Chery says. “There’s a new generation that’s going to rise into power. Inevitably, everything needs to shift in a different direction, the same way that if we go back to 2009 into the 2010s, there were all these artists from the blog era planting the seeds to becoming leaders of their generation. All this to say if we look back 10 years, we had a clear idea of who the leaders of the new generation were, and that’s not necessarily the case now. The same guys that were the leaders of the new generation 10 years ago are clearly still the biggest in the space today.”
While Chery says those artists haven’t seen the culture-defining moment that puts them atop the charts and atop the zeitgeist yet, artists like Carpenter or Roan have shown this year that an artist with enough of a fanbase seizing the moment may only be a song away.
“it’s possible, I think it’s just harder,” he says. “I think that as long as we have someone in the hip-hop space who’s able to make music that resonates on a large scale, they’re going to be able to do it.”
As for what differentiates the superstars down the line from the rest, as Jackson says: “It’s just consistency, man. It’s just consistency.”
