As any musician knows, it’s a tough task to score a top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. The feat requires some blend of the following key ingredients: a strong song; a charismatic artist; consistent promotion and marketing effort,; an engaged fan base; and maybe even a viral live performance, meme or other stroke of luck. To rise (and stay) at the top of the game, then, demands a consistency that few artists ever achieve. But when an artist catches fire, they can run off a string of hits in rapid succession.
To celebrate those artists, Billboard compiled a roll call of artists who cemented their pop dominance by landing five or more top 10 hits from a single album. Not only does such a feat rely on the same qualities listed above, but for an album to sustain, it needs to recreate those moments for a mass audience over the course of months.
It should come as little surprise, then, that the first album to house five top 10s was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the best-selling album of all time. Since then, 30 albums have followed in the legendary LP’s footsteps. At the time, Jackson set a high of seven top 10s from one album, a mark later matched by Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA (1984-85), Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989-91) and Drake’s Scorpion (2018) for the highest total from any set, before Drake’s Certified Lover Boy scored nine top 10 successes in 2021, and Taylor Swift’s Midnights upped the record to 10 in 2022.
Check out our rundown of albums that have produced five or more top 10 hits on the Hot 100. The who’s-who covers a cross-section of genres, including pop, rock, R&B and hip-hop and includes superstars such as Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston and Katy Perry.
(Note that this list only covers original editions of albums, though three albums – Usher’s Confessions (2004), Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad and Taylor Swift’s Fearless – did accomplish five top 10s through deluxe editions and reissues.)
https://www.billboard.com/photos/albums-five-top-10-hot-100-hits-6738611/