Old Songs Dominate 2026 Charts and Playlists

Listeners in the UK and US are streaming older music far more than new releases, according to data from the analytics company Luminate. In the first half of 2026, about 60% of the music played had been released five or more years earlier. Tracks from the previous 18 months were well behind.

The UK singles chart tells the same story. Eighteen of the year's top 20 bestselling songs came out a year ago or earlier. Zara Larsson's Lush Life, first released in June 2015, is the eighth biggest hit of the year. Michael Jackson's Billie Jean (1983) sits in 22nd place and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams (1977) in 30th.

New songs that do break through tend to stay for a long time. Sam Fender and Olivia Dean's duet Rein Me In has set a UK record with 23 non-consecutive weeks at number one. In the US, Ella Langley's Choosin' Texas is now the longest-running number one in chart history.

Streams concentrated at the top

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has found that nearly two thirds of streams are of music by the top 0.4% of artists. Some musicians say a viral hit does not guarantee a career, because it can be hard to promote later releases. J Erving, founder of Raye's distribution company Human Re Sources, told Billboard that fans are more passive today and that an artist is only "broken" when people care about them beyond one song.

Streaming services say they want to back newer acts. Oliver Schusser, head of Apple Music, said the service is working to champion "tomorrow's artists" in its curation. Sofar Sounds, which puts on gigs by grassroots musicians, is launching a campaign called the Human Discovery Movement. People can text a "mystery number" and get voice notes from its tastemakers recommending new music.

Playlists built by AI

Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music let premium subscribers generate playlists from text prompts. Musicologist Anna-Kaisa Kaila says there is potential for bias, since a system with little training data in a less commercial style will find it harder to surface tracks in that style. London DJ and curator Tim Garcia says such playlists draw on everyone's listening data, so the suggestions closely resemble what a listener already plays.

London artist Chiminyo says generated playlists can mislead people into thinking the tracks are hand-picked. In a jazz piano playlist on Spotify with over 370,000 saves, he found top artists with unverified accounts and almost nothing about them online. In his view the tracks sound near identical. Spotify says it has introduced platform-wide policies against impersonation and is working to filter out AI-related problems, while accepting that AI use in music production sits on a spectrum.

Deezer says AI accounts for just 0.5% of streams on its platform, and Spotify says it has removed 75 million "spammy tracks".

Source: BBC News