ROSÉ, Alex Warren and More Lead Slow 2025 on Global Charts

As we enter the second half of 2025, the ghosts of 2024, and 2023, still haunt the Billboard Hot 100. Hit songs are lasting longer on the charts, reflected by the glut of songs from the last couple years still lodged in the top 10: Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With A Smile” in its 45th week, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” in its 63rd and Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” in its record-extending 97th frame. But as it turns out, the failure to generate a new year’s worth of new hits is not just a domestic issue – it’s global.

Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” is No. 1 on the July 5-dated Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart for a seventh consecutive week. In the week ending June 26, it drew 48 million streams worldwide, according to Luminate. It’s a big number in a vacuum, but it represents another low in a descending trend of weekly international streams. This is the first week since March 2024 that no song collected more than 50 million streams outside the United States.

Since the global charts launched in September 2020, 129 songs have crossed the 50 million-mark in at least one week outside the U.S. Only seven of those, however, did so for the first time in 2025, compared to 17 in the first half of 2024 and 14 in the same period of 2023. In addition to “Ordinary,” which spent the last five weeks generating 50-52 million non-U.S. streams, there was JENNIE’s “like JENNIE,” Kendrick Lamar & SZA’s “Luther,” Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” and three songs from Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.

Further, “Ordinary” is the first (and only, so far) song released in 2025 to top the Global Excl. U.S. chart, and it took until the May 24-dated list to reign. Last year, Ariana Grande’s “Yes, And?” led before the end of January and was followed by six more in-year chart-toppers before the midyear mark. Only 23 songs have cracked the top 10 this year, down from 47 in the same window of 2024.

One could explain the slow turnover atop the chart in part by the dominance of two Bruno Mars collaborations. His songs with Lady Gaga (“Die With A Smile”) and ROSÉ (“APT.”) ruled for 17 and 19 weeks, respectively, and remain on Warren’s heels on this week’s survey at Nos. 2-3. Mars’ nine-month blockade was interrupted for one week by Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” but it doesn’t bode so well for a potential fresh slate of global hits that his biggest competition came from a 1994 holiday song.  

It goes beyond Mars’ super-charged duets. Before “Die With A Smile,” Billie Eilish ruled Global Excl. U.S. with “Birds of a Feather,” her 2024 smash that sits at No. 6 – 58 weeks into its run. Stepping back further, the chart’s top two songs of 2024 were Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” both of which are unmoved in this week’s top 20, at Nos. 13 and 15, respectively.

Clearly, diminished turnover on the charts extends beyond the U.S. Still, on a chart that is well suited to represent a wide swath of international talent, it’s almost a uniformly American group of artists that refuse to clear the path, from Boone and Carpenter to Gaga and Warren.

At last year’s midyear point, Billboard reported that the share of non-American, non-English-language hits in the top 10 was significantly down from the previous year. That trend holds into 2025, as non-English-language songs barely bump from 34% to 34.7%, but in a significantly shrunk pool of top 10s. Two years ago – amid a strong 2023 for regional Mexican music – that bar was 64%.

Further, of the eight top 10 songs to feature non-English lyrics from this year, six of them are by Bad Bunny, powered by his Jan. 5 album release. Had that LP not come out, there would have only been one Spanish-language song to reach the top 10 on the Global Excl U.S. chart over an entire six-month period. Last year’s first half featured a wider variety of Spanish-language hits, by Feid, Peso Pluma, Kali Uchis, Xavi and more.

The one Global Excl. U.S. top 10 to include lyrics in any other language this year is JENNIE’s “like JENNIE.” But even that song features a mix of English and Korean lyrics, leaning more toward the former. Same goes for 2024 holdover “APT.,” from fellow BLACKPINK member ROSÉ, and Mars. Other recent top 10 hits by K-pop artists – BTS’ Jin and J-hope – are sung entirely in English. Last year’s crop of hits by Korean acts extended beyond the BLACKPINK and BTS universes, and was more evenly mixed in language, including songs by aespa, ILLIT and NewJeans.

This is to say nothing of the absence of 2025 top 10s in Italian, Japanese and Turkish, all of which were represented in prior years.  

Heading into the second half of 2025, the top 10 of Global Excl. U.S. remains stagnant. Nothing new cracks the upper tier this week, and the top nine songs are all down in consumption. Only two songs in the entire top 20 are up from last week: sombr’s “Back to Friends,” steady at No. 10 and up 1%, and Karol G’s “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido,” up 12% as it rebounds from No. 30 to No. 20 in its 53rd week on the chart, resurgent due to the June 20 release of her new album, Tropicoqueta. The next bulleted track is “Rock Your Body” by the Black Eyed Peas (No. 23), a 2009 song experiencing a revival from a dance trend on TikTok.

It’s not there haven’t been any new international crossovers. South Africa’s WizTheMC climbed to No. 6 in May with “Show Me Love,” bringing a taste of amapiano to the global charts. MOLIY (Ghana) collaborated with Silent Addy, Skillibeng & Shenseea (all from Jamaica) on the remix to “Shake It To The Max (Fly),” which reached No. 5 in June and adds a fifth week in the top 10 this week.

Looking forward, K-pop girl group aespa could impact next week’s global charts with “Dirty Work,” released on Friday (June 27). The single features four versions, including an all-English take on its title track, though the version with Korean lyrics is the early leader on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube.

What’s more, six tracks from the soundtrack to Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters debuted on this week’s Global Excl. U.S. tally, and are likely to surge next week, introducing a new – and in some cases, fictional – slate of international (South Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil) acts to the global charts in 2025.