‘Die With a Smile’ Lands Lady Gaga Her First Adult Pop Airplay No. 1 & Bruno Mars His Fourth
Gaga wraps a wait of nearly 16 years for her first leader on the list.
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Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile” ascends three spots to No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Pop Airplay chart (dated Dec. 7).
The ballad, on Streamline/Atlantic/Interscope/ICLG, becomes Gaga’s first leader on the radio ranking, and Mars’ fourth. He previously reigned as featured on Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk!,” for a week in 2015, and with his own “When I Was Your Man” (two weeks, 2013) and “Just the Way You Are” (five, 2010).
Among her 12 Adult Pop Airplay top 10s, Gaga had reached a prior No. 2 best with two hits: “Shallow,” with Bradley Cooper, in 2019, and “The Edge of Glory,” in 2011.
Gaga tops Adult Pop Airplay 15 years, 11 months and two weeks after she first appeared on the chart dated Dec. 20, 2008, when “Just Dance,” featuring Colby O’Donis, debuted (on its way to a No. 7 peak). She ends the longest wait for a first No. 1 dating to an initial visit to the chart since Elton John and Britney Spears’ “Hold Me Closer” led for a week in March 2022. John ranked (with “Blessed”) on the chart dated March 16, 1996, when the list first published in Billboard’s print edition. Spears arrived on the survey in March 1999 with her breakthrough classic, “…Baby One More Time.”
The Adult Pop Airplay chart ranks songs by weekly plays on 80 adult top 40 radio stations monitored by Mediabase, with data provided to Billboard by Luminate.
Gaga burnishes her overall radio chart résumé, as she also boasts eight No. 1s Pop Airplay, four on Dance/Mix Show Airplay and two on the all-format Radio Songs ranking.
“Die With a Smile” crowned the Billboard Global 200 chart for eight weeks in September-October, the most for any song this year. It has tallied over 100 million streams globally in each of the last 13 weeks (through the Dec. 7-dated chart), the longest such streak since the survey began in September 2020.
On the Billboard Hot 100, “Die With a Smile” has hit a No. 2 high. It has ranked in the top 10 for all 15 of its weeks on the chart so far, dating to its late-August entrance – the most frames in the region consecutively from a debut week for any of Gaga’s 18 top 10s, one-upping “Applause,” which spent its first 14 weeks on the chart in the top 10 in 2013.
