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Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” Extends Billboard Airplay Record as Radio’s Longest-Running No. 1 Force
Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” has set the all-time Billboard airplay mark with 106 cumulative weeks at No. 1, a cross-format feat that underscores how rare true radio longevity has become.
Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” has turned sustained radio dominance into a statistical outlier. With its run at No. 1 on Adult Contemporary, the song reached 106 cumulative weeks atop Billboard’s airplay charts, the highest total ever recorded across the publication’s radio rankings.
The key milestone came as “Flowers” logged its 51st week at No. 1 on Adult Contemporary in June 2024, pushing it to 100 combined weeks at the time; it later extended that lead to 57 weeks on the chart and 106 overall. Released in January 2023 via Columbia, the track also led Radio Songs (18 weeks), Adult Pop Airplay (17), Pop Airplay (10), and Dance/Mix Show Airplay (4).
What makes this record meaningful is not just longevity, but cross-format endurance. “Flowers” didn’t belong to one lane. It moved from Top 40 into adult formats and stayed there, a pattern that increasingly defines true mass-market hits in an era where streaming spikes are common but radio shelf life is harder to maintain.
Only one other song has reached triple digits: Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” which sits at 100 cumulative weeks at No. 1 across airplay charts. Its total is powered by long runs on Adult Pop Airplay (30 weeks), Radio Songs (27), Adult Contemporary (27), and Pop Airplay (16). Warren framed the track’s appeal to Billboard in 2025 as rooted in timeless subject matter, saying, “I think every single year there’s always that wedding song or love song.”
Through the May 9, 2026-dated charts, 22 songs have spent at least 52 combined weeks at No. 1 on Billboard airplay rankings. The broader list maps three decades of radio consensus, from Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” and “One Sweet Day” to The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and “Easy on Me.”
Mariah Carey remains a central figure in this metric, including the seasonal anomaly of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which has amassed 61 weeks atop Holiday Airplay alone. Adele’s entries underscore the same core dynamic as Cyrus: songs that transition from immediate pop event to long-tail adult-format staples.
Billboard currently publishes 25 active airplay charts, with the modern framework built on electronically monitored radio data supplied by Luminate. In practice, this means cumulative No. 1 totals reward songs that perform across formats, regions, and demographics over extended windows, not simply tracks that peak quickly.
In that context, “Flowers” is more than a massive single from Cyrus’ post-Plastic Hearts era. It is now the clearest benchmark for what radio ubiquity looks like in the 2020s: broad, durable, and nearly impossible to dislodge.
