Is Rap Dying? Here's What the 2025 Pop Charts Reveal

Every few years, a familiar panic resurfaces: Is rap dying? It’s the question that resurfaces whenever the charts tilt toward a different sound, or when nostalgia has listeners longing for an era where hip-hop felt more unified, more grounded, more recognizable. But 2025 offers a clearer lens than speculation ever could, because the numbers, the charts, and the cultural landscape all tell a more complicated story. Not a story of death, but of transformation. 

Rap isn’t disappearing. It’s expanding faster than its audience can keep up. 

To understand this shift, all you have to do is look at the Rolling Stone Top 100 Songs of 2025: this list reflects not only what people are listening to, but why the musical center of gravity has changed. 

The Top 10 songs of the year read like a cross-section of modern music’s diversity a landscape where pop, salsa, dembow, alt-country, K-pop, and rap all fight for oxygen. And in that competition, the narrative becomes clearer. Rap hasn’t died; it just no longer occupies that throne alone. 

10. Chappell Roan — “The Subway” 
A shimmering, melancholic alt-pop confessional that evokes Cocteau Twins textures and open-air emotional release. Roan turned a live staple into a chart-climbing heartbreak anthem, a quiet storm that hits with precision. 

9. Kendrick Lamar & SZA — “Luther” 
A slow-burn duet built on a butter-soft Luther Vandross sample. Kendrick moves away from the combative tone of last year’s hits and leans into warmth, intimacy, and melodic nostalgia. On tour, this was the emotional showstopper the kind of track that proves rap’s softer edges still captivate stadiums. 

8. Taylor Swift — “The Fate of Ophelia” 
One of the year’s biggest songs, a synth-pop epic reimagining Shakespeare’s tragic heroine with soaring, theatrical romance. Swift’s fanbase pushed this to a seven-week reign at Number One, reshaping the charts around her gravitational pull. 

7. YoungBoy Never Broke Again — “Shot Callin’” 
An explosive trap anthem fueled by eleven months of pent-up energy after a year in prison. It’s melodic, it’s menacing, and it became the de facto soundtrack for athletes and content creators. YoungBoy returned swinging, and the culture responded. 

6. Sabrina Carpenter — “Manchild” 
A gleeful ABBA-inspired pop rodeo dripping in humor and finesse. Carpenter’s sharp one-liners and Jack Antonoff’s buoyant production turned this into a signature track of 2025. Proof that wit, when paired with immaculate production, wins. 

5. Kehlani — “Folded” 
R&B in its most vulnerable, hypnotic form. Built around the mundanity of cleaning an ex’s forgotten clothes, “Folded” became a national sigh. A relatable, aching reflection that drew Brandy and Ne-Yo into remixes

4. Bad Bunny — “Baile Inolvidable” 
A stunning salsa-infused standout featuring musicians from Puerto Rico’s Escuela Libre de Música Ernesto Ramos Antonini. Nostalgia, storytelling, and cultural pride collide, reminding the world that Latin music continues to shape global soundscapes. 

3. KPop Demon Hunters / Huntr/x — “Golden” 
An animated K-pop juggernaut delivered through layers of synths and affirmations, performed by Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami, and EJAE. The song spent eight weeks atop the charts, its cinematic optimism resonating across cultures. 

2. MJ Lenderman & This Is Lorelei — “Dancing in the Club” 
Alt-country heartbreak elevated into something mythic. Lenderman strips the Auto-Tune sheen from the original and reveals a raw, twangy lament; a devastating reminder that simplicity still has power. 

1. Lady Gaga — “Abracadabra” 
A triumphant return to the texture of early Gaga: disco haze, rising synths, and a hook that feels engineered for immortality. It’s modern nostalgia, knowingly self-referential, and executed with precision. 

Rap is present, but no longer dominant. And that shift has less to do with decline than with internal competition and fragmentation. 

Rap didn’t start as the sprawling constellation it is today. Its early forms: boom bap, G-funk, lo-fi aesthetics, jazz-rap, battle rap, and golden-age lyricism, spoke to a singular, tightly concentrated audience. The genre was easier to track, easier to define, and easier to market. But now? Rap has fractured into dozens of subgenres, each with distinct audiences, aesthetics, and cultural roots: 

We aren’t living in a world where “rap fans” move as a single unit anymore. We’re living in a world where every listener has an algorithmically curated pocket universe. Where rap was once a monolith, it’s now an archipelago. When attention is split, dominance fades. That’s not because a genre is dying, but because so many voices are speaking at once for a single narrative to survive. 

The democratization of music creation has completely rewritten rap’s ecosystem. Everyone is a rapper now, and to not be like their predecessors they put their own spin to it and that creates subgenres.  Anyone with: a phone, cheap mic, or a cracked version of FL Studio can upload their own version of “rap” in minutes. This has produced innovation, which we are grateful for but also noise. Oversaturation doesn’t kill genres. It dilutes the focal point. 

In a landscape where everybody raps, where every subculture has its sound, and where rap aesthetics appear in pop, R&B, K-pop, and even country, the boundaries become blurred. Rap hasn’t lost influence. Its influence is so strong it’s bleeding into every other genre. And the cost of that expansion is fragmentation. 

Another silent factor in rap’s “decline” conversation is Billboard’s 2025 rule change: 

If a song falls below #25 after 26 weeks, it is automatically labeled as “recurrent” and removed from the Hot 100. 

This disproportionately affects those slow-burn rap hits, songs with strong cultural staying power but modest radio push, tracks that thrive on street buzz rather than mainstream playlists. Kendrick’s “Luther” is a perfect example; a major cultural moment that was shortened on the charts because of a technicality, not a lack of impact. If the rule wasn’t changed we wouldn’t have saw the headline “No Rap Songs Are in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40 for the First Time Since 1990.” For rap, a genre built on community momentum rather than curated radio; this rule artificially clips its wings. 

Not even close. What we’re seeing is the end of rap as a centralized genre, not the end of rap itself. Rap is: fragmented, diversified, globalized, hyper-specialized, algorithmically siloed, and most certainly oversaturated. But these are the symptoms of growth, not of death. Rap didn’t fall off. It expanded beyond the point of singular identity. It became big enough to stop being one story. 

In 2025, rap isn’t dying. Rap is evolving faster than the conversation around it. 

The nostalgia is loud. The charts are competitive. The audience is divided. But the art form is alive and well. Just too alive to fit neatly back into the template people remember. The future of rap isn’t monolithic. It’s scattered, global, hybrid, experimental, and unpredictable. Which is exactly what hip-hop has always been: a shape-shifter, refusing to stay still long enough for anyone to declare it over.