Lil Baby’s ‘Low Down’ Shoots Into Top 10 on Hot Rap Songs Chart Thanks to March Madness Bump

Thanks to the Kansas State Wildcats’ men’s basketball team, a 3-year-old Lil Baby deep cut surges into the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart.

The rapper’s track “Low Down” races 20-7 on the list dated April 8 after the song exploded as a viral force on TikTok thanks to the college basketball team. The Kansas State Wildcats used the song as a warm-up and soundtrack for team meetings, with members of the team and coaching staff clapping along and dancing to the song’s beat. Amid the team’s run to the Elite 8, scores of more “Low Down” clapping clips appeared on the social media platform and sparked its growth on streaming services.

“Low Down” registered 9.6 million official U.S. streams in the week ending March 30, according to Luminate, a 108% swell from its 4.6 million total a week earlier. The sum prompts the track’s No. 6 debut on the Rap Streaming Songs chart and a No. 32 entry on the all-genre Streaming Songs list.

With “Low Down,” Lil Baby adds his 43rd top 10 on Hot Rap Songs, which blends streaming, radio airplay and sales for its rankings. It’s his second visit to the top 10 in 2023 and follows “Freestyle,” a 2017 track which climbed to a No. 8 best in February after its own viral moment in 2022. That summer, social media users began a challenge in which they pretended to record a song in a studio in front of a big group of their friends. Renewed interest in the track led to its Streaming Songs debut that August, and the fan-favorite cut has continued to float around since then, consistently hovering around the 50-song threshold of the chart.

“Freestyle” and “Low Down” secure the 28-year-old rapper’s sixth straight year with multiple top 10 visits on Hot Rap Songs. Lil Baby first broke the top 10 barrier in June 2018 with the Drake collaboration “Yes Indeed,” and returned to the region twice more that year. The prolific hitmaker tallied two top 10s in 2019, eight in 2020, nine in 2021 and 19 in 2022.

Elsewhere, “Low Down” re-enters at No. 15 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, after having spent one week at No. 39 in 2020 upon its original release. Likewise, on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100, the track returns at No. 50 for its second week on the list, after a No. 81 showing in 2020. “Low Down” appeared on the deluxe edition of Lil Baby’s blockbuster 2020 album, My Turn, which spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and was named the chart’s No. 1 album for the year-end recap in 2020.