Chart Climber: Tracking The Rise Of Ella Mai’s “Boo’d Up”

U.K. singer Ella Mai first rose to fame on Instagram, posting popular cover videos that got her noticed (and eventually signed) by DJ Mustard. Since then, she’s released a series of EPs, including her most recent effort Ready in February 2017. The EP begins with a catchy but unassuming song titled “Boo’d Up,” which has quietly been gaining traction over the past year.

This week, the song entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart at No. 78 over a year after its release, marking Mai’s first Hot 100 entry. On Genius, the track has amassed over 122,000 pageviews, making it her second-biggest song on the site behind only her 2016 Ty Dolla $ign collaboration “She Don’t.” Genius data shows the song reaching a daily pageview peak of 2,041 on March 21 and continuing to perform strongly throughout April:

“Boo’d Up” launched quietly last February, with 241 pageviews on the day of its release. It averaged just 176 daily pageviews throughout 2017, and didn’t begin to pick up significant steam on Genius until later February of this year. By mid-March, however, it was averaging over 1,000 pageviews per day, and it hit a peak of 2,041 on March 21.

As usual, streaming service playlisting seem to be a significant factor in a song’s rise. “Boo’d Up” currently appears on Spotify’s popular playlists Are and Bee (4,149,638 followers) and Chilled R&B (1,181,118 followers) as well as Apple Music’s The A-List: R&B. According to Billboard, the song earned 6.7 million U.S. streams last week, up 27 percent from the week before.

It appears that radio play has been a major driver of popularity, too, with “Boo’d Up” first landing in the Top 40 of the Rhythmic Radio chart in early March after several months of climbing. U.S. audience impressions for the song on radio reached 14 million this week, up 21 percent. Mai has repeatedly encouraged her fans to request the song on radio stations and retweeted many who recorded themselves listening to it on the radio:

She also received a strong cosign from Chris Brown last year, who posted a video of himself jamming to “Boo’d Up” on his Instagram page in May 2017 and later linked up with her for his Heartbreak on a Full Moon track “This X-Mas.” His promotion led to a small pageview spike for “Boo’d Up,” which hit its 2017 peak of 630 daily pageviews shortly after the Instagram cosign. Her opening slot on Kehlani’s SweetSexySavage tour likely helped raise her profile, too.

Mai is gearing up to release her debut album sometime this year, but “Boo’d Up” is still gaining steam. It remains to be seen how high the track can climb on the Hot 100 chart, but—much like Daniel Caesar’s “Get You” before it—"Boo’d Up" is shaping up to be another slow-burning R&B hit.

Listen to the song above and read all the lyrics to Ella Mai’s “Boo’d Up” on Genius now.