Bring Back Recurrents

People tend to listen to the same thing over and over, but now those repeat listens get charted

When I was 17, I listened to a lot of music. Oasis, Third Eye Blind, Radiohead, Barenaked Ladies, what have you. Based on the musical choices on my CD player, these bands dominated my Billboard 200. If the band had multiple albums, I did not listen to just the latest one—rather, I shuffled through multiple discs.

(True story: When I was a teenager, I tried creating my own alternative rock charts, which I posted on Usenet. I was inspired by someone doing something similar, a guy named Matt Levine who is not the Bloomberg writer. I wrote a piece on Matt a while ago. I should check in with him.)

But I ultimately only had one way to influence the charts, maybe two or three if I was feeling forward. I could go to a store and buy an album or a single, or I could request a song on a local radio station. Maybe I could tell my friends about how cool a specific band is, or join the fan club. But it isn’t like now, where I ended up being one of the first people to write about the fast-folk juggernaut that is Jesse Welles.

These days people have small, but direct influence over how the charts play out—and they know it. If they listen to a Tyler, The Creator album, they know that they are contributing to the record’s chart-topping success on the Billboard 200, and also ensuring that even the deep album tracks appear on the Billboard Hot 100. Even watching a YouTube video—and putting it on repeat—can be a big up to the artist you dig.

So now we have a situation where people can listen to the same album over and over, and in the case of the Billboard 200, the album will never stop charting. Big fan of Drake’s Take Care? You’re not alone—that album is in the Billboard 200’s Top 40 nearly 15 years after it came out. And don’t get me started on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

But given how much money your average physical album made for a given artist, the chart presence doesn’t really replace the money that single album generated. (That is, unless you’re at a scale where, like Drake, you can have an album chart on the Billboard 200 for 647 weeks, or 12 and a half of the past 14 years.)

When the available money is fractions of fractions of a penny, you basically have to reach superstar-esque status to even hit the Billboard 200, which wasn’t the case even 15 years ago.

I did a quick check, out of curiosity, of the current week’s Billboard 200 (week of August 2, 2025). If you haven’t been following this chart closely, the numbers will be startling: While the top 10 is all recent releases, 42 of the top 100 albums have been on the chart for 100 weeks or longer, and 102 of the top 200. There are some albums that have probably never left the chart since the week of their release. Bruno Mars’ 2010 album Doo-Wops & Hooligans has served nearly as much time (738 weeks) as an album from 1991, Metallica’s self-titled “black album” (799 weeks), a famous example of a long-charting catalog album. It recently outpaced another 1991 album, Nirvana’s Nevermind (732 weeks). Of the 773 weeks since Doo-Wops & Hooligans first came out, it has only been off the Billboard 200 for 35 of them.

And even many of the albums that haven’t been on the chart for 100 weeks are longstanding classics—Radiohead’s 28-year-old OK Computer shows up, for example. (That album, a favorite of mine, is often compared to Dark Side of the Moon, but it has quite a while to go to match its chart history.)

In one sense, the chart is a great signifier of enduring success in the streaming era. Nobody who remembered the initial drama around Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die would have guessed it would eventually appear on the Billboard 200 for a staggering 598 weeks. But it also shows how the chart can obscure new music. If half the chart is made up of albums that have been on the charts for more than two years, how is any new artist going to even have a chance?

So why did this happen? The root of this problem emerged in the summer of 2009, and it involved the biggest pop star in the world.

How Michael Jackson’s death exposed a major gap in the Billboard 200’s methodology

Nobody was prepared for Michael Jackson’s unexpected 2009 passing. The shock was palpable when it happened, and it wasn’t like anyone had written any obits.

His passing, and the outpouring of public grief, posed an unprecedented challenge for Billboard: The Billboard 200 did not include the best-selling album in the country. The reason for that was that it was a catalog album, 2003’s Number Ones.

“This week marks the first time since Nielsen SoundScan began tabulating data in 1991 that a catalog album has sold more than the No. 1 current set on the Billboard 200 albums chart,” the publication wrote at the time.

And it wasn’t even close. If Jackson’s works had been allowed to appear on the Billboard 200, they would have dominated the top three spots that week. Clearly, in this specific case, this was a problem. The magazine’s most important chart had no way to celebrate one of its most prominent artists.

Jackson’s passing turned Number Ones, a somewhat forgotten best-of collection from an era when labels were releasing chart-topping compilations from their biggest artists, into a major hit. Per the magazine, it was the fourth-biggest selling album of the entire year, according to the Top Comprehensive Albums chart. Thriller was number 16.

So, how did Billboard resolve this issue? Easy: They decided to convert the Top Comprehensive Albums chart into the Billboard 200. The move, announced in November 2009 and taking effect at the start of 2010, effectively made the most important chart into one that includes catalog items, too. Silvio Pietroluongo, the magazine’s director of charts, specifically cited Jackson’s death as a reason for this change.

“The events of 2009 and the continuing creativity in the repackaging of catalog titles have led us to conclude that the Billboard 200 would be best served presenting the true best-sellers in the country, without any catalog-related rules or stipulations, to our readers, the media, and music fans,” he said.

He added that the added impulse on the part of consumers “to impulsively purchase new or catalog titles electronically has changed music sales behavior.”

In this light, it absolutely makes sense that albums like Drake’s Take Care, Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die, and Bruno Mars’ Doo-Wops & Hooligans just have these insane, never-ending chart runs. They were some of the first big albums of this new era, so they never had to leave the charts.

The old Billboard 200 was relegated to the Top Current Albums chart, which still exists today, though is somewhat buried on Billboard’s own website. This chart is pure album sales, with no streaming included, and it tells an interesting story. On this chart, an indie rock-focused artist like Alex G ranks in the top 20, but on the Billboard 200, he can muster no better than 166.

In another era, someone like Alex G would have had a moderate to solid sales week on the Billboard 200, and after his fan base bought the album, they would fall off, making a small ripple. (Which is why the relatively obscure Amos Lee had a chart-topping album.) From a popularity perspective, this would have allowed Alex G to say he had a top-20 album, then go build his audience on the road or online.

I was inspired to write this after watching a Middle 8 video on YouTube where it discussed the fact that Vampire Weekend had a relatively low chart position for its last album. The band had three chart topping albums earlier in its career, but they seem to have lost a step as their fans had aged. Earlier this year, the Arcade Fire faced a similar decline in chart position as its most recent album, Pink Elephant, failed to hit the Billboard 200 altogether.

In the latter case, lingering controversy around the band’s singer, Win Butler, likely took the wind out of the band’s sails. But I think it is important to note that, like Alex G, these are bands that historically tended to have big initial sales weeks, but would then quickly fall down the charts. (Lorde, while a streaming favorite so more buoyant than the other artists in this section, is having one of these chart arcs at the moment.) When everyone is streaming and these bands are competing against massive pop-oriented catalog albums, they’re likely to be left in the dust—except on the Top Current Albums chart, where they still make those modest, respectable showings.

Don’t get me wrong—I think if I were Billboard in 2009, I would look at the Michael Jackson situation and re-assess my processes, too. But this chart change feels so dramatic in retrospect that it borders on misguided.