Six Songs, One Surge: Drake's Chart Week, Counted From Our Own Numbers

By Previously Staff, Previously

October 14, 2026

Previously pulls Apple Music's US charts every six hours. This week's pull needs no press release: Drake holds the No. 1 song, five of the top 25 outright, and the top of our computed artist ranking — a surge with a paper trail that starts with an Oct. 2 deluxe reissue.

There is a version of this story that waits for a chart column to explain the week. This is not that version. Previously pulls Apple Music's Most Played charts in the United States every six hours for our music hub, and the pull from the morning of Oct. 14 tells the story in plain numbers: the No. 1 song in the country on Apple's chart is Drake's “Québec,” five of the top 25 songs carry his name, and when our hub computes its artist ranking from chart presence — songs and albums, weighted by position — Drake sits at No. 1 with the basis printed next to his name: six songs, three albums on this week's charts. Surges are usually described. This one can be counted.

The Count

Start at the top of the songs chart and read down. No. 1: “Québec,” billed to Drake and Don Toliver. No. 4: “Janice STFU.” No. 9: “HABIBTI (FOMO).” No. 13: “2 Hands (Of God).” No. 17: “Body Talk,” with Kesha. That is five of the top 25 on the overall chart; a sixth Drake song, “Die For Me (Part 2)” with Yeat, sits in the hip-hop panel's top 25, which is how the hub's artist math reaches six. On the albums chart he holds two of the top 25 — $ome $exy $ongs 4 U at No. 19 and, remarkably, Take Care at No. 24, an album released in 2011 out-charting most of this year's new releases — with a third Drake album charting inside the genre panels.

Counts like this are why the music desk now treats a chart pull as an assignment, not a decoration. One artist holding a fifth of the top 25 is not a good week; it is a takeover, and it has a cause.

The Driver: A Deluxe With a Match Lit Under It

The cause has a release date: Oct. 2. That is when Drake issued HABIBTI (FOMO), a deluxe expansion of his eleventh studio album HABIBTI that added four songs — “Solar Eclipse” featuring Don Toliver, “Québec,” “Cold Shoulder” featuring Toliver and Yebba, and “Classic PT2” — taking the album from 11 tracks to 15. The songs had been teased weeks earlier in FOMO, a Toronto-centered short film Drake premiered during a Sept. 15 YouTube livestream, so the deluxe arrived with demand already built.

The album numbers show what that demand did. On the Billboard 200 dated Oct. 17, HABIBTI vaulted from No. 116 to No. 2 — matching its peak — on 71,000 equivalent album units in the tracking week ending Oct. 8, a 506 percent increase, with nearly 70,000 of those units from streaming, according to Luminate figures reported by The Source and Hypebeast. “Solar Eclipse” debuted at No. 5 on the Hot 100, Don Toliver's highest-charting song to date. And the week placed Drake in rare company: for the first time, Drake, Taylor Swift and The Beatles occupied the Billboard 200 top five simultaneously — the three acts with the most career No. 1 albums on that chart, with 15, 15 and 19 respectively.

Our Apple pull is the downstream of that detonation: the deluxe's songs did not just chart, they stayed at the top of the most-played list a week and a half later, and they dragged the back catalog with them — which is how a 2011 album ends up at No. 24 in 2026.

It Is Not Only Drake Up There

Read the rest of the top 10 and the week gets more interesting. Ella Langley holds No. 2 with “Choosin' Texas” and No. 8 with “Be Her” — two of the top 10 for a country singer on a chart that rarely gives country one. The connection is closer than adjacency: The Source reported that “Solar Eclipse,” the deluxe's lead collaboration, is built on an interpolation of “Choosin' Texas,” which means the No. 2 song on our chart is, in a real sense, inside the Drake album campaign sitting above it.

Around them: Bruno Mars' “I Just Might” at No. 3, Kehlani's “Folded” at No. 5, Olivia Rodrigo's “Man I Need” at No. 6, RAYE's “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” at No. 7 — the same RAYE whose Royal Albert Hall presale crashed into a bot flood this week — and Taylor Swift's “The Fate of Ophelia” at No. 10. It is a genuinely mixed chart. Which is exactly why one name appearing six times stands out.

About That No. 1 Album

One line of our albums chart needs a sentence of honesty, because the desk's job is reporting the chart, not worshipping it. The No. 1 album on Apple Music's most-played list this week is Brown Noise — a brown-noise sleep record. Apple's albums chart ranks by plays, and a record designed to be played all night, every night, by people trying to sleep will out-play almost any album ever made. It is not the week's most beloved album; it is the week's most-played one, and those are different claims. The desk prints the chart as pulled — Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl sits at No. 2 — and explains the oddity rather than letting a sleep aid pose as the album of the week.

That distinction is the whole point of counting from our own numbers. Next pull lands within six hours; if the surge holds, the desk will say so, and if it breaks, the desk will say that too — from the data, the same way this story was built. Drake's week, in the meantime, is not in dispute. It is in the chart, six songs deep.