For as long as the Billboard charts have existed, chart accreditation has been a tricky thing. The question of who gets listed as what on a Billboard chart entry can come down to a matter of industry politics, label or artist demands and/or sheer form-filling drudgery. As a result, there are times when the credits can end up reading as redundant, insufficient or straight-up inaccurate. And in the most extreme cases, sometimes an artist can get credited on a song where they didn’t actually do anything on the recording.
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Such was the case for at least three songs that reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. While in all three such cases, the song in question ended up being the biggest Hot 100 hit for its respective performing artist — for two of them, it was their only Hot 100 hit — in each case, said artist did not actually do any performing on the song, at least not musically. Their accreditation on their respective hits instead came down to cases of unfair promotional practices, sloppy paperwork or sheer industry unpredictability.
Read on below to find out how it happened for all three.
