For the first time in 35 years, the Billboard Top 40 has no hip-hop or rap songs. Here’s why

Hip-hop and rap have been driving culture in the U.S. for almost four decades now, especially in America. So why are these songs missing from the Top 40? It's ...complicated.

Starting in the late ’70s, hip-hop and rap ascended through popular culture, mostly in America but also in other countries.

Then, in 1990, a breakthrough. Hip-hop and rap tracks began infiltrating the Billboard Top 40, and for the next 35 years, we saw dozens of these songs reach official hit status. By the end of the decade, hip-hop/rap had supplanted rock as the nation’s cultudral driver when it came to music. It seemed unstoppable. America would forever be a hip-hop nation.

This month, however, a surprise. For the first time since 1990, the Billboard Top 40 was devoid of any hip-hop and rap.

What happened? Does this mean it’s on the decline and on the way out? Well, no. The genres are very alive and well. Its absence has more to do with the way charts are compiled these days than the popularity or strength of the songs.

Charts are the way the music industry keeps score with itself. The higher a song or album rises, the more opportunities for hype. Radio play increases, sales go up, and more people stream the songs. And at the end of the year, the record company executives measure themselves against each other over who had the most high-charting singles and albums.

And it used to be so simple. Charts were compiled based on sales and radio airplay. In the streaming era, there’s a complicated weighting system that tries to convert digital music consumption into old-school sales. One modern metric is the Track Equivalent Album (TEA). Under this formula, 10 digital song sales from the same album equal the sale of one album, thereby unifying digital sales with physical ones.

Billboard also has Streaming Equivalent Sales (SEA). This measurement counts on-demand plays of a song through Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and all the other platforms. If 1,500 songs are streamed from the same album, that counts the same as an old-school sale of an album. Radio airplay plus sales and TEA and SEA are supposed to give the industry an accurate and complete picture of how a certain release is doing.

Put this all together and we have a chart compilation situation that is vastly different from what late broadcaster, Casey Kasem, used to count down every weekend. There’s plenty of gamesmanship happening.