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They Were Robbed
The tale of the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, the place where hits go to die—in some cases, over and over again. Let’s talk about the chart through the lens of its two most iconic artists.
1959
The first year that the Bubbling Under chart appeared next to the Hot 100, about a year after the release of the first chart. Originally featuring 15 additional songs, it was intended as a way to highlight emerging hits, which at the time, tended to blow up regionally before going national. It was a chart for potential sleeper hits. In the early years, the chart was full of songs that didn’t quite set the world ablaze. The second place song on the original June 1, 1959, chart, The Eternals’ “Rockin’ in the Jungle,” is an excellent example of this challenge in action. The song appeared on the Bubbling Under chart for a couple of weeks, then on the lower reaches of the Hot 100 for a few weeks, then it disappeared for good. Classic Bubbling Under chart arc.
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Why YoungBoy Never Broke Again is the quintessential modern Bubbling Under artist
The best way to discuss the Bubbling Under phenomenon is to first explain it in very 2026 terms, rather than starting at the beginning and hitting the modern day. Nowadays, the way that songs seem to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 seems to essentially follow a couple of key methods:
- The traditional method—lots of radio play and label marketing. “Die With A Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars is a great recent example of this.
- A song returns to the charts, or makes its debut very late, thanks to its appearance on TikTok or in a popular TV show. She & Him’s belated top 40 appearance, 2008’s “I Thought I Saw Your Face Today,” exemplifies this.
- Virality sweeps up a new artist, whether planned or unplanned. This is the model Shaboozey and Alex Warren used to climb the mountain.
- An artist with a huge following releases an album, and most of its songs chart because fans are listening in droves.
The last descriptor applies very much to Taylor Swift and a few other massive artists, but it also describes Youngboy Never Broke Again, an excellent example of someone who releases a lot of music. Recently, news hit that NBA YoungBoy, as he’s also called, had more RIAA certifications than any other rapper ever, with 126 separate certifications since his 2017 debut. (By the way, he’s 28 years old, and has spent a major portion of his time in the spotlight in prison or on house arrest. Talk about speedrunning life.)
The number of certifications, on top of his nine platinum albums, reflect the fact that anytime he releases an album or mixtape, both it and its songs tend to chart. He has charted 106 songs on the Billboard Hot 100—but he has charted 109 on the Bubbling Under list. He has only had one top-ten hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (the 6x platinum “Bandit,” a 2019 joint collab with the late Juice WRLD, who died the year it was released), but 13 number-one hits on the Bubbling Under list.
Basically, Youngboy Never Broke Again floods the zone so aggressively that he can be impossible to ignore. He’s never on top of the chart, but he’s always on it—a strategy that basically means you have to keep releasing product multiple times per year. He doesn’t give listeners time to miss him, and rather than saturating the market, the market has effectively proven the savvy of this over-release strategy.
Youngboy fully admits he has a problem with pacing. As he told Billboard in 2023:
“It’s a disease,” he shares of his ability to put out as much music as possible. “Literally, I cannot help myself. I tell myself sometimes, ‘I’m not going to drop until months from now,’ but it’s addictive. I wish I knew when I was younger how unhealthy this was for me. Whatever type of energy I had inside me, I would’ve pushed it toward something else.”
He adds, “The music is therapy, but I can’t stop it when I want,” he goes on, sounding almost ashamed. “And the lifestyle is just a big distraction from your real purpose.”
When you release so many songs that the Wikipedia page for just your discography is many times longer than the average Billboard Year-End Hot 100 chart, it ensures that not all of your singles are going to be big hits.
Based on his release strategy and his young age, his record of most Bubbling Under hits is likely to keep growing.
But the thing is, being a prolific Bubbling Under artist in the Spotify era is way different from how it worked even 15 years ago. It is hard to compare them. To highlight the difference, I have to point you to the quintessential pre-digital Bubbling Under band: The Robbs.
1985
The year that the Bubbling Under Hot 100 took a pause, disappearing in the August 31, 1985 issue and only returning in 1992. If you go to the Billboard site, the chart shows its start date as December 5, 1992, when a song that would become an actual legit hit would top the chart. (In case you’re wondering, Positive K’s talking-to-a-female-version-of-himself hit “I Got A Man,” which hit the top 20. It was a weird song!) Feel like reliving the pre-1992 history? Joel Whitburn’s Bubbling Under the Hot 100, 1959-1985, a 1992 book, covers the pre-modern-era-history more or less completely. And it’s on the Internet Archive.
This song was never actually released but hit the Bubbling Under charts anyway, which raises the question—how do they tabulate these things?
Five random facts about the Bubbling Under list
- The number of songs on the list has varied significantly over the years. While it’s been more or less consistent since 1992, the chart varied between 10 tracks and 35 in the early years, and sometimes didn’t appear in Billboard at random points in the 1970s.
- At least one perceived lostwave track appeared on the chart. The 1979 song “Ready N’ Steady” by the artist D.A. has an interesting history. In Joel Whitburn’s Bubbling Under the Hot 100, 1959-1985, he literally offered a cash reward to anyone who had information about it. It took until 2016 for someone to find it—and it turns out the song wasn’t even properly released. You can listen to it here—to my ears, it sounds like the unholy merger of Bob Seger and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
- Two of Pearl Jam’s iconic hits bubbled under for years. “Alive” and “Even Flow” were hits just before the Bubbling Under chart made its inauspicious return in 1992, but hadn’t been released as physical singles until 1995, something the band did in response to costly imports. (They weren’t previously eligible for the Hot 100 because of a well-known chart quirk that ignored album tracks.) The combination of singles’ unusual reason for existence and their well-after-the-fact release strategy kept them bubbling under for years. “Alive” put in a record 61 off-and-on weeks, and “Even Flow” 52. (“Jeremy,” released at the same time, had a shorter stay on the Bubbling Under charts because it actually hit the Hot 100.)
- The Village People held the most-weeks record before Pearl Jam. While better known for “Macho Man” and “Y.M.C.A.” today, the group’s 1977 debut single “San Francisco (You’ve Got Me)” put in a surprising 30 weeks on the bubbling under chart. That’s the most during the Bubbling Under chart’s original run, per Whitburn. (Fun fact: Their first album was only 22 minutes long and had just four songs.)
- At least one bubble song made a big pop. The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” a classic example of a regional hit gone national, spent 10 weeks on the Bubbling Under chart in multiple runs before hitting the Hot 100 and getting all the way #2 on the charts. If you hang out on the Bubbling Under chart for that long, you generally don’t have the juice. “Louie Louie,” perhaps thanks in part to its surrounding controversy, was the exception. (Paul Revere & The Raiders also covered this song, a point that will become notable in a second.)
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The Robbs bubbled under six times without having a single hit—but it’s what they did after that makes them notable
So, let’s say that your band was discovered by one of the most powerful people in the music industry. Your band had a record deal with a major label—and you were huge regionally, scoring a number of hits in your local market.
You even appeared on national TV, and the band you replaced was one of the biggest hitmakers of its era.
But, for whatever reason, you couldn’t quite make the leap beyond regional prowess. However, after you hung it up (after an attempted reinvention), you went behind the scenes and helped other artists score huge hits of their own.
That’s the story of The Robbs, a band that still holds the record of “most Bubbling Under Hot 100 hits without hitting the Hot 100,” 55 years after they set it. Formed in the early 1960s around the lead singer Dee Robb, the band eventually landed its primary name around 1965. (Robb, in case you’re wondering, is a stage name, like Ramone, but three of the four members were actually brothers.)
Soon, a guy named Dick Clark caught wind of them, got them a record deal, and made them the house band of his show Where the Action Is, a spinoff of American Bandstand. Early in its history, Bandstand appeared on television every weekday, but had been relegated to Saturday afternoons by the mid-1960s; Action took its place. And that meant that The Robbs got a ton of television exposure during an era when it made a huge difference.
It worked out quite well for the band they replaced on Action, Paul Revere & The Raiders, who scored a number of top-20 hits while on the show and immediately after. (As mentioned above, Paul Revere & The Raiders also recorded an early version of “Louie Louie.” They’re all over this story despite not really being prominent bubblers themselves.)
The Robbs were set up for this success themselves. After all, Dick Clark, the guy who got them their record deal, was the one talking them up on this show—as highlighted by his intro on the video for their first big almost-hit, “Race With the Wind.”
The band, in vests and puffy shirts, had the look of what was popular—they sounded like The Byrds, and Dee Robb had a Rickenbacker in his hands, just like Roger McGuinn. (Though his guitar had six strings, not twelve.)
The songs had strong regional success, and were featured in huge profiles in their home state of Wisconsin. An example of the coverage from the Appleton Post-Crescent in 1966:
The singing group, one of the top in the country after 27 appearances on Dick Clark’s “Where the Action Is.” have been tugged at, run after and mobbed by fans across the country. Wednesday, after having to break a dinner date the night before when their bus “blew up”, they took time to sit down and talk with four Appleton teenagers.
In a living room, relaxed and comfortable, drinking Pepsi and munching potato chips, the Robb boys came through as intelligent and full-of-humor young men, riding the crest like real surfers, full of the adventure of their lives, loving every minute of it, but never, except as performers, taking themselves seriously.
The piece speaks of the members, a band of brothers and a cousin, as if they were a bunch of kids, and yeah, they probably were. But it seemed like they were on track to having a pretty amazing career. However, the chart position said otherwise—in a pre-internet era, regional success of the kind that gets you long newspaper features wasn’t always enough.
“Race With the Wind” stalled at #3 on the Bubbling Under charts, a victim of regional success that didn’t translate nationally. And they would do no better than that, even after multiple tries. Between 1966 and 1971, the band had six songs appear on the Bubbling Under chart—and none got even close to “Race With the Wind” and its mediocre watermark.
By the early ’70s, the band was ready to hit the reset button. They renamed themselves Cherokee, releasing a couple more singles … that saw similar levels of success.
(Not helping: The closest thing The Robbs had to a professional rival, Paul Revere’s renamed The Raiders, scored their only chart-topping hit with a rendition of “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian).” That’s right, a song whose chorus very prominently features the word “Cherokee,” the very word The Robbs chose as their new name. Talk about upstaging.)
However, if there’s one thing that stands out about Cherokee’s sound compared to their earlier songs, it‘s the production. Their final almost-hit, “Girl, I’ve Got News For You” sounds pristine, the beneficiary of top-of-the-line production smarts. While it musically matches where they started, sonically it sounds like a million bucks.
And that actually highlights where the band’s members essentially went after the whole being-stars thing didn’t work out. In 1972, three of The Robbs’ four members opened Cherokee Studios in the rural Chatsworth area of Los Angeles, a studio that grew into major prominence as major acts like Steely Dan went to use it. The Chatsworth ranch proved a temporary home, alas, because by the mid-1970s, landlord troubles forced them into a new location.
That new location, the former MGM Studios in Hollywood, put them on the fast track to running one of the most prominent studios in the world. For more than three decades, every major act you can think of from the ’70s and ’80s made a stop there. One of the first albums recorded out of the location was David Bowie’s Station to Station, and that was just the start. Tom Petty recorded Damn the Torpedoes there, Michael Jackson Off the Wall, and Mötley Crüe Shout at the Devil.
How well-regarded was it? George Martin once called it the best American studio. And, most notably, Ringo Starr nearly got all four members of The Beatles on a Cherokee-produced album—only for John Lennon to get assassinated weeks before his session with Ringo.
Wild stuff, and it happened with the three Robb brothers—Bruce, Joe, and Dee—at the console. They didn’t quite get the chart-toppers themselves, but because of that, they still became associated with more than 300 gold and platinum records—a level that NBA Youngboy will need another five years to reach, minimum.
The studio is still active today, albeit in a new location that was opened in 2011. (Wanna learn more? Check out the 2021 interview Produce Like a Pro did with Bruce Robb.)
The Robbs didn’t bubble over, but numerous major artists that did got a little help from them. Let’s call them honorary Hot 100 members.
The Bubbling Under chart goes beyond Nuggets, to drop a reference to a legendary compilation literally packed with shoulda-been hits. The thing is, if you know your chart history, there may be diamonds hiding in the bottom reaches of the chart. Which means that if you’re in the samples game, the “Bubbling Under” chart is a great place to look for ideas.
In the 2010s, two relatively big hits were created from a song that never got higher than #2 on the Bubbling Under chart. That song, “Bound” by the Ponderosa Twins Plus One, became the basis for one of Kanye West’s best-regarded singles, “Bound 2” (which samples the chorus) and years later, Tyler, The Creator’s “A Boy Is a Gun” (which samples the verse).
Both songs hit the actual Hot 100. “Bound 2” hit #12, a middling performance for the controversial rapper. “Bound” was bound to the lower reaches.
Tyler, The Creator was involved in producing both songs. I can’t assume that he has a copy of Joel Whitburn’s Bubbling Under the Hot 100, 1959-1985 hanging around, but the fact that these samples found a modern context reflects that the music might have been made for the wrong moment.
The Ponderosa Twins Plus One story didn’t end particularly great—a child group made up of a pair of twins and a non-twin lead singer, the group broke up because of lack of sales. One pair of twins died before Kanye’s song came out; the other has largely spent the last 50 years in prison. That left Ricky Spicer, the “plus one” of the equation, to fight for the resulting legal battle from the Kanye song.
(Spicer, who has been described as the “Michael Jackson” of the group, spent much of the 2010s suing basically anyone he felt violated his copyright—magazines, streaming services, the list goes on.)
A vintage song that hits the Bubbling Under chart but never leaps over it is likely to have all the parts of a hit—a great chorus, a radio-friendly sound. But it’s missing that one thing to put it over the edge. Presumably artists with deep record collections can find and resurface that very thing and make a hit out of it. There is some trap artist out there that is going to find a way to turn D.A.’s “Ready ‘N’ Steady” into more than just a chart curiosity.
If the Ponderosa Twins Plus One want to take any cold comfort in this situation, it’s that the Kanye sample has helped make them far more memorable than hundreds of other “Bubbling Under” artists. It helped them bubble over.
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You know what’s better than something that bubbles under? A machine that just works—like la machine! Give them a look.
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