20 Songs Notoriously Blocked From #1 on the Hot 100 This Decade
Reaching #1 takes timing and luck as much as it takes the right song.
Some hits run into a phenomenon they were never going to beat. Others lose by 1% or less, sit behind the same song for months, or fade into a competitive chart without ever getting a shot.
This article ranks the 20 most notorious #1 blocks on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 2020s, in order from least to most infamous, in our opinion.
To be clear up front:
- Peaking at #2 is not required. A #3 hit can qualify if it was part of a genuine race or controversy, if it came close to #1 despite two songs sitting above it, or if its peak badly understates the song’s overall size.
- Songs that peaked at #1 are still included. The Hot 100 is a weekly list, and we include songs that were blocked from #1 for weeks or months, even if they eventually reached the top or already peaked at the summit.
The list is broadly based on the following criteria:
- A notorious chart race involving fanbases, last-minute tactics or a social media meltdown
- Months spent stalled at #2 or #3
- A final margin of 1% or less
- A coordinated fan campaign that still fell short
- Consumption that would have won an ordinary week but met exceptional competition
- A peak that badly understates the song’s overall size
20. Luke Combs — Forever After All (November 2020)
Forever After All debuted on the November 7, 2020 chart at #2. At the time it was the highest Hot 100 debut ever for a solo male country artist.
One song finished above it: Ariana Grande’s positions, which debuted at #1 the same week. The battle for #1 caused a spat with Grande’s fanbase that many remember to this day.
19. Billie Eilish — BIRDS OF A FEATHER (2024)
BIRDS OF A FEATHER spent three straight weeks at #2, ending with the October 26, 2024 chart. All three were behind Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy).
The timing was somewhat brutal. It spent ten weeks in the top 3 while A Bar Song was working its way toward a record-tying 19 weeks at #1.
It finished with 33 weeks in the top 10, and ranks as the decade’s #18 hit on our US chart hits ranking.
18. Nicki Minaj & Lil Baby — Do We Have a Problem? (February 2022)
Do We Have a Problem? debuted at #2 on the February 19, 2022 chart. Above it sat the Encanto hit We Don’t Talk About Bruno, in its third week at #1.
The release bumped into a rule change aimed squarely at fan campaigns. Weeks earlier, Billboard had stopped counting bulk digital purchases and limited each customer to one sale per week. Buying the same song ten times now counted once.
The Barbz went at it anyway. The song led Digital Song Sales with 48,000 downloads and opened at #2 on Streaming Songs with 24.4 million US streams, outselling the next seven songs on the sales chart combined. Bruno still won on streaming and radio.
Minaj responded on Twitter, telling fans she did not need to go #1 because she already was #1. She argued that Billboard changing the rules right before her return to rap was probably not a coincidence.
17. SZA — Kill Bill (Early 2023)
Before Kill Bill reached #1, it spent eight weeks at #2: one behind Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero, six behind Miley Cyrus’ Flowers, and one behind Morgan Wallen’s Last Night.
The six weeks behind Flowers were the defining stretch. SZA sat at #2 from late January through the March 4, 2023 chart, then returned to #2 in April. A Doja Cat remix finally pushed Kill Bill to #1 on the April 29 chart.
SZA did eventually get the #1, but only after eight separate weeks at #2.
16. Future feat. Drake — Life Is Good (Early 2020)
Life Is Good debuted at #2 in January 2020 with strong consumption and stayed there for eight straight weeks. Every week was behind the same viral sensation: Roddy Ricch’s The Box.
While there was no controversy involved, the eight-week run is notable because it is the longest stretch at #2 for a song that debuted there and never reached #1 in the 2020s.
15. Luke Combs — Fast Car (Summer 2023)
Luke Combs’ Fast Car spent eight weeks at #2 and never reached #1.
All eight weeks at #2 were behind country hits: Morgan Wallen’s Last Night blocked it five times. Oliver Anthony Music’s Rich Men North of Richmond blocked it twice. Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves’ I Remember Everything blocked it once.
14. Benson Boone — Beautiful Things (March 2024)
Beautiful Things spent 42 weeks in the Hot 100’s top 10, yet its #2 peak lasted a single week.
On the March 30, 2024 chart it rose to #2 behind Teddy Swims’ Lose Control, which recorded its only week at #1. What makes its peak notable is that our final prediction placed Beautiful Things a single point behind Lose Control, a margin of less than 1%.
Both artists were signed to Warner Records. Rather than push hard for Beautiful Things, the label effectively “sacrificed” it and let Lose Control finish its months-long climb to #1.
That one-point week was Boone’s only real chance and it never reached the summit.
13. Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars — Die With A Smile (November 2024)
Die With A Smile spent four straight November weeks at #2 behind Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy), and the fourth was the closest. In what was one of our most notable misses in Hot 100 prediction history, we put Gaga and Mars at #1 by a thin margin, but A Bar Song held on at #1 for its record-tying 19th week.
The Christmas rush then pushed Die With A Smile down the chart. It finally rose to #1 on January 11, 2025, nearly five months after release, and stayed there for five weeks.
Still, the November loss is the part chart watchers remember.
12. Brenda Lee — Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
Through the January 7, 2023 chart, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree had spent eight weeks at #2 in the 2020s. Every one was behind Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You, which returned to #1 as soon as each holiday season began.
For the song’s 65th anniversary, Brenda Lee and MCA mounted a real campaign. Lee released its first official music video on November 3, 2023, with Tanya Tucker and Trisha Yearwood appearing alongside her.
It worked. On the December 9, 2023 chart, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree reached #1 for the first time, 65 years after Lee recorded it, with Mariah rising to #2 behind her.
The win lasted two weeks. Mariah took #1 back on December 23, and Lee has finished behind her every season since. Across the 2020s, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree has now spent 16 weeks at #2, every one behind the same song.
11. Rihanna — Lift Me Up (November 2022)
Rihanna’s first solo single in six years debuted at #2 on the November 12, 2022 chart. Lift Me Up arrived with 48.1 million radio audience impressions, 26.2 million US streams and 23,000 downloads sold.
The release became an openly discussed race against Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero. As projections tightened, Swifties warned each other that Swift could lose the top spot while Rihanna’s Navy rallied around her comeback.
Anti-Hero held #1 for a second week, and Lift Me Up fell to #22 the next week. A brief rebound to #8 was its only other top 10 appearance.
10. Tommy Richman — MILLION DOLLAR BABY (May 2024)
In its third chart week, MILLION DOLLAR BABY surged to 66.3 million US streams and still ranked only #3 on the Hot 100. This kind of streaming performance would have been enough to reach #1 in practically any other week, but it happened to peak during possibly the strongest chart week of the entire decade.
I Had Some Help debuted with 76.4 million streams and Not Like Us posted 72 million the same week. It was the first time two songs had ever topped 70 million US streams in the same week, and MILLION DOLLAR BABY never reached #1.
9. Drake feat. Lil Durk — Laugh Now Cry Later (August 2020)
Laugh Now Cry Later debuted at #2, directly behind Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP, which was in its second week at #1 on the August 29, 2020 chart.
WAP debuted the week before with 93 million US streams, the largest debut streaming week ever. It was still posting 72.2 million in its second week, just ahead of the 69.8 million that Laugh Now Cry Later opened with.
Drake and Lil Durk landed within 2.5 million streams of a record-setting phenomenon, with a debut that would have won pretty much any normal week.
It had one clean shot at #1, and that shot happened to land in the second week of the cultural behemoth WAP.
8. Sabrina Carpenter — Espresso (2024)
Espresso never even reached #2. It spent six weeks at #3, first on the June 22, 2024 chart, behind I Had Some Help and Carpenter’s own Please Please Please.
It’s one of the few singles of the 2020s that surprises people when they hear it never reached #1 in the US. There was no controversy or public meltdown here. It was simply a huge song that went up against a competitive chart and lost.
Espresso finished with 33 weeks in the top 10 and became one of 2024’s defining songs, yet the other pre-release single from the same album was the one that reached #1. On our US chart hits ranking, Espresso is the decade’s #20 hit with 14,106 inverse points, while Please Please Please ranks #73 with 7,190.
Espresso was nearly 2x as big across its full Hot 100 run, but the smaller single got the #1 partly due to luck.
7. Olivia Dean — Man I Need (Early 2026)
Man I Need has spent seven weeks at #2 without reaching #1: once behind Bruno Mars’ I Just Might and six times behind Ella Langley’s Choosin’ Texas.
Two weeks were especially close. Our final predictions put Dean around 1% behind I Just Might on the January 31 chart, and around 1% behind Choosin’ Texas on February 14.
Our midweek predictions in the February case had Man I Need at #1 by a small margin. The finalized data dropped it back to #2.
It returned to #2 five more times through April and never finished the climb.
6. Olivia Rodrigo — good 4 u (Summer 2021)
While good 4 u debuted at #1, the season-long blockade is why it appears here because it was widely considered 2021’s song of the summer but ended up losing the title. It was, at least, summer’s biggest streaming hit.
BTS’ Butter arrived the week after good 4 u with one of the biggest point totals of the decade. good 4 u dropped to #2, even though it gained in streams and radio after the release of SOUR, making it far stronger at #2 than it had been at #1 in its first week.
good 4 u went on to spend 11 weeks at #2: eight behind Butter, which posted enormous consecutive sales weeks largely from the strength of direct-to-consumer website sales (now ineligible for Billboard’s charts), one behind BTS’ other hit Permission to Dance, and two behind The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber’s STAY.
In 2021, it spent only one week at #1. Under current chart rules, a strong case can be made for it being a double-digit #1.
5. Megan Thee Stallion feat. Beyoncé — Savage (May 2020)
The Beyoncé remix of Savage was released two days before Doja Cat released a remix of Say So with Nicki Minaj. It immediately became two fanbases against two fanbases, with every projection treated as ammunition.
When the chart was published, Savage had comfortably won streaming, but Say So had a far bigger radio audience, outsold it on downloads, and saw its sales jump sharply after the Nicki remix. That was enough to give Say So the #1 and leave Savage at #2.
Savage finally reached the top on the May 30 chart. By then, the competing remixes, late sales pushes, and constantly updated projections had made the week one of the most notorious chart races of the year.
4. Drake & 21 Savage — Rich Flex (November 2022)
Rich Flex debuted at #2 behind Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero on the November 19, 2022 chart. Its consumption was enormous, launching at #1 on the US Streaming Songs chart with 58.9 million streams.
Anti-Hero stayed on top after seven remixes came out during the tracking week, sending its download sales up 1,793% to 327,000. The remixes were valid under Billboard’s rules, but their scale and timing still made this the decade’s most argued-over case of sales variants deciding a #1.
Drake did not exactly hide his annoyance. He reposted Billboard’s top 10 to his Instagram Story with Swift’s name and Anti-Hero covered by emojis. Everything else remained visible, including Sam Smith and Kim Petras at #10.
Rich Flex stayed at #2 for three straight weeks, all behind Anti-Hero, until the Christmas takeover ended its chance.
3. Justin Bieber — Yummy (January 2020)
Yummy debuted at #2 on the January 18, 2020 chart with 71,000 downloads, 29.3 million US streams and 50.9 million radio audience impressions. Roddy Ricch’s The Box beat it with 68.2 million streams.
The rollout is why Yummy ranks this high. Justin Bieber reposted a fan-made guide that told listeners to loop Yummy in playlists while they slept and to use a VPN outside the US. He deleted it after the tactics drew wide ridicule, and Roddy Ricch responded by telling his own fans to stream Yummy.
After all that, it opened at #2 and never got another shot.
2. 6ix9ine — GOOBA (May 2020)
One week after the Say So versus Savage showdown, the Hot 100 produced an uglier fight.
On the May 23, 2020 chart, Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber’s charity duet Stuck with U debuted at #1, Say So fell to #2, and 6ix9ine’s comeback single GOOBA entered at #3.
6ix9ine believed he should’ve been #1 and accused the artists and Billboard of manipulating the result. Billboard publicly rejected his claims and explained how the streams and sales were audited. GOOBA posted 55.3 million eligible US streams. 6ix9ine pointed to a much higher public YouTube view count, but that figure was global and did not map directly to Billboard’s US-only total, which also filtered for eligible plays.
The spat also ended up causing 6ix9ine to leak the Hot 100’s proprietary formula, which was unknown to us and the public at the time. We used it going forward to produce more accurate predictions.
GOOBA never came close again and fell to #11 the following week. No other blocked #1 this decade produced a public meltdown like it.
1. Dua Lipa — Levitating (May 2021)
Levitating climbed to a #2 peak on the chart dated May 22, 2021, behind Silk Sonic’s Leave the Door Open. That was its only week at #2, yet it stayed in the top 10 for 41 weeks and on the Hot 100 for 77 weeks, becoming one of the biggest hits of all time on the chart.
Our final prediction in May 2021 placed Levitating at #1. That week’s Hot 100 ended up being delayed, which was described as lasting approximately 48 hours, one of the longest delays in Hot 100 history. The Hot 100 top 10 highlight normally appeared Monday afternoon, followed by the full chart early Tuesday. The promised Tuesday reveal came and went, and the result finally appeared at 10:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, May 19.
Chart watchers during this period exploded with speculation about what was going on behind the scenes.
While fans waited, a number of them independently reported being served a promoted TikTok ad that celebrated Levitating reaching #1, before any chart had been published. We believe the delay involved a label dispute over the song’s chart position, particularly regarding its download sales.
When the chart was finally revealed, Leave the Door Open was #1 and Levitating was #2. Our revised prediction calculated that Levitating had missed the top spot by around 1% or less.
Billboard responded to the delay by saying it had run standard audits with its data partners to “recognize and resolve anomalies.” It never said what the anomalies were.
Later that year, Billboard named Levitating the #1 Hot 100 song of 2021. It was the first year-end #1 since Lifehouse’s Hanging by a Moment in 2001 to never top a weekly chart.
