Elton John & Britney Spears’ ‘Hold Me Closer’ Hits No. 1 on Adult Pop Airplay Chart

Elton John and Britney Spears’ “Hold Me Closer” climbs to No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Pop Airplay chart (dated Nov. 26).

John adds his second Adult Pop Airplay leader, both achieved this year: His previous team-up modernizing his catalog, “Cold Heart (Pnau Remix),” with Dua Lipa, ruled for a week this March. That song updates four John classics, while “Hold Me Closer” focuses on 1972’s “Tiny Dancer” and 1992’s “The One.”

Spears earns her first Adult Pop Airplay No. 1. Among 14 prior entries, she reached a No. 19 best with “Till the World Ends,” featuring Nicki Minaj and Kesha, in 2011.

The Adult Pop Airplay chart reflects weekly plays, as monitored by Luminate, on reporting adult top 40 stations.

“Hold Me Closer” launched at its No. 6 best on the Sept. 10-dated all-genre, multi-metric Billboard Hot 100. It became John’s 29th top 10 – and extended his record for the longest top 10 span of any artist not involving holiday songs (51 years, seven months and three weeks) – and Spears’ 14th top 10.

The collab previously crowned Digital Song Sales, Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, Dance/Electronic Streaming Songs, Dance/Electronic Digital Song Sales and Dance/Mix Show Airplay.

Among the track’s other airplay successes, it reaches a new No. 5 high on the Nov. 26 Adult Contemporary chart, having become John’s record-extending 42nd top 10 (and Spears’ first), and has hit No. 10 on Pop Airplay.

Despite its relatively modest Hot 100 history, as it peaked at No. 41 in April 1972, “Tiny Dancer” previously received renewed attention thanks to its prominent sync in the 2000 film Almost Famous. “The One,” meanwhile, rose to No. 8 on the Hot 100 in September 1992.

“He gets your charts daily,” David Furnish, John’s husband and business partner, recently told Billboard. “He gets them printed out on hard copies, because he goes through with highlighters. And he literally has different highlighters for different records he charts – ones from Britain, ones from America, the ones that are going up, ones that are his, ones that he has a connection to. He watches it daily. It feeds a part of his soul. And he’s absolutely over the moon with the way these new records have performed. And you know, you’re gonna see more.”