Mega Monday: Olivia Dean's 'Man I Need' Finally Hits No. 1, Ending 'Choosin' Texas' Record 23-Week Run
The best-reviewed song on the Hot 100 top 10 for ten straight weeks finally reaches No. 1, dethroning Ella Langley's record-setting 23-week run, while ADÉLA's 'Nicole Kidman' cracks the top 10 for the first time.
By Song Reviews · October 5, 2026
What Mega Monday Is
Every Monday, Song Reviews takes the previous week’s Billboard Hot 100 top 10 and asks the one question a chart position can’t answer on its own: is the popularity deserved? Most weeks that question cuts against the No. 1 song. This week it doesn’t.
This Week’s Chart
The Hot 100, week of October 3, 2026:
| # | Song | Artist | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Man I Need | Olivia Dean | 8.8/10 – climbs from No. 9 to No. 1, ten weeks after this column called it “the best-reviewed record on this week’s chart” and the only song on it the acclaim actually fit. |
| 2 | Choosin’ Texas | Ella Langley | Falls to No. 2 after a record 23 consecutive weeks at No. 1. Given the full Feature Friday treatment already, not re-reviewed here. |
| 3 | BbY WOW | KAROL G, Judeline & rusowsky | 7.7/10 – climbs from No. 7 to No. 3, its highest Hot 100 position yet. |
| 4 | So Easy (To Fall In Love) | Olivia Dean | 8.0/10 – climbs from No. 8 to No. 4, Dean’s second song in the top five this week. |
| 5 | Boston | Stella Lefty | 8.0/10 – falls from No. 2 to No. 5 after six weeks inside the top two. |
| 6 | Been by Now | Morgan Wallen | 7.3/10 – falls from No. 3 to No. 6. |
| 7 | Dracula | Tame Impala & JENNIE | 6.4/10 – falls from No. 5 to No. 7. |
| 8 | I Knew It, I Knew You | Taylor Swift | 6.3/10 – falls from No. 6 to No. 8. |
| 9 | Hate That I Made You Love Me | Ariana Grande | 6.0/10 – falls from No. 4 to No. 9, the biggest drop in the top 10. |
| 10 | Nicole Kidman | ADÉLA | New to the top 10, up from No. 22. Given the full Feature Friday treatment three weeks ago, not re-reviewed here. |
Is the Popularity Deserved?
Yes, for once, cleanly. “Man I Need” entered this chart in late August already carrying a billion Spotify streams, a Song of the Year trophy from the MOBOs, and No. 1s on four continents, and it still took ten weeks of climbing one and two spots at a time to reach the top of the Hot 100 – the single chart that had, until this morning, been the one place its reputation hadn’t caught up to its reach. Billboard’s underlying numbers for the chart dated October 3 have it up 11% in radio airplay audience and essentially flat in streaming, which is the shape of a song that finishes winning on the slow, unglamorous metric rather than a reignited viral spike. This column flagged it in August as the chart’s one position where the acclaim and the record actually matched. Nine weeks and eight chart positions later, the chart agrees.
The record it replaced deserves its own sentence before moving on. Twenty-three consecutive weeks at No. 1 is the longest run in Hot 100 history, and Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” didn’t lose that streak to a single bad week – Billboard’s figures show streaming for the song down for a fourth straight week, off another 6%, against a radio number that’s finally started softening too. That’s a record ending the ordinary way a long chart run ends: not knocked off by a bigger song, worn down by its own length. It’s still at No. 2, which is not a fall from grace, just the first week since February it hasn’t been the biggest song in the country.
The rest of the chart continues the pattern this column has been tracking since late September: the three lowest-scored records here, Ariana Grande’s “Hate That I Made You Love Me” (6.0), Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” (6.3) and Tame Impala and JENNIE’s “Dracula” (6.4), are also the three lowest-ranked, at Nos. 9, 8 and 7. Two weeks ago those same three songs were clustered at Nos. 4 through 6; now they’ve slid to the bottom of the top 10 while Dean’s two singles and “BbY WOW” – a record built on streaming growth rather than a launch-week push – all climbed. And “Nicole Kidman,” the subject of this column’s own Feature Friday three weeks back, has finally pushed into the top 10 itself, debuting at No. 10 off the same streaming growth this column noted when it was still sitting at No. 22. Add it up and this is the best-aligned top 10 this column has covered since Mega Monday started in August: the songs going up are, with one exception, the songs that earned it, and the record that just ended its historic run did so by simply running its course rather than getting outplayed.
Hero image: Olivia Dean performing at SWR3 New Pop Festival, Baden-Baden, Germany, 2023, by Harald Krichel, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.