Twenty-one artists have achieved the ultimate sign of success on the Billboard 200 – a No. 1 album – without ever cracking the Billboard Hot 100. Four of these acts have done it more than once. Slipknot and Vampire Weekend have each landed three No. 1 albums without ever cracking the Hot 100; Marilyn Manson and the late Bob Newhart have each had two.
Most of the acts on this list lie outside of the pop mainstream, which explains why they haven’t landed on the Hot 100. The 21 acts include three hard rock or metal acts (Pantera, Marilyn Manson and Slipknot), three K-pop acts (SuperM, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and ATEEZ); two contemporary Christian music artists (Bob Carlisle and tobyMac), two comedians (Newhart and Vaughn Meader), two classical or classical crossover acts (Van Cliburn and Il Divo) and two modern-day folk acts (The Decemberists and Amos Lee).
One artist on this list, Judy Garland, had numerous hits on Billboard pop charts from 1940 to 1945 – before the 1958 inception of the Hot 100. These include such classics as “For Me and My Gal” (a duet with Gene Kelly), “The Trolley Song” and the Oscar-winning “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (a collab with the Merry Macs.) And, of course, her Oscar-winning 1939 classic “Over the Rainbow” is one of the most beloved recordings of the 20th Century – though it predated Billboard’s first National and Regional List of Best Selling Retail Records (July 27, 1940), which is widely regarded as the first weekly national pop chart.
Let’s scroll back through this list of acts who reached the top spot on the Billboard 200 but have yet to crack the Hot 100. If any of these acts ever do make the Hot 100, we’ll remove them from this list.