The shortest song to ever hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 lasts just 98 seconds: 'Stay,' which topped the chart on November 21, 1960.

Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs' doo-wop single "Stay" runs just 1 minute 38 seconds, making it the shortest of the 1,183 songs to top the Billboard Hot 100.

Turn on "Stay" and you have time to check your watch twice before it's over. The record clocks in at 1 minute 38 seconds — 98 seconds — and when it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 21, 1960, it set a mark no song has beaten since. Across the entire Hot 100 era, from the chart's debut on August 4, 1958, to October 11, 2025, Guinness World Records counts 1,183 songs that have reached the top. "Stay" is the shortest of all of them.

How a 98-second record topped the chart

The song is doo-wop at its leanest: a lead vocal, a walking bass line, and the famous falsetto leap of the bridge — "Why don't you stay?" — sung by Zodiacs member Shane Gaston. There is no wasted bar. Maurice Williams wrote the song years before it was recorded, reportedly as a teenager pleading with a date to stay out later. By the time it was cut and released in 1960, that adolescent urgency was baked into the arrangement: the record makes its plea and gets out.

Billboard's own chart history tracks the climb precisely. According to the magazine's 2024 "Forever No. 1" retrospective on the song, "Stay" entered the Hot 100 at No. 86 on October 3, 1960, then rose over the following weeks until it reached the summit on November 21. It spent only a single week at No. 1, but that week is enough to secure its place in the record books.

How we know it's really the shortest

The runtime is not a fan's stopwatch estimate — it's Billboard's official figure. Guinness World Records, in its entry for "Shortest song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100," lists "Stay" at 1 minute 38 seconds and notes that Billboard confirms that exact timing. Billboard reached the same conclusion independently in its 2016 feature "The Longest & Shortest Hot 100 Hits," built on data from Record Research and chart archivist Paul Haney, which ranks "Stay" as the shortest No. 1 the chart has ever produced.

That combination matters for a claim like this. A single song being brief is trivial; a song being the *shortest of more than a thousand chart-toppers across sixty-seven years* is a claim you can only make by tallying every No. 1 and timing them all. Guinness pegs its 1,183-song count and its window to a specific end date, October 11, 2025 — the kind of hard boundary that lets anyone re-check the math against the chart archive rather than take it on faith.

There's a nice bit of pop-history symmetry, too. "Stay" outlived its own moment several times over: The Four Seasons covered it in 1964, and Jackson Browne closed his 1977 album "Running on Empty" with a version — fittingly, given the original's own theme, extending the song by welcoming the crowd to hear "just one more song." Williams' original stayed short.

The seam

The one thing worth arguing about is where the counting stops. Guinness's "shortest of 1,183" figure is anchored to that October 2025 cutoff, and the Hot 100 keeps producing new No. 1s every week. Nothing forbids a future single from arriving under 98 seconds — and in an era of streaming-optimized tracks engineered to be short enough to survive the skip button, a sub-1:38 chart-topper is more plausible now than at any point since 1960.

So the record is exact, verified, and — for the moment — unbroken. But it's the kind of record that lives on a clock. Someday a producer chasing the algorithm may clip a song even tighter and land it at the top, and Maurice Williams' plea to stay a little longer will finally have to make room. Until then, 98 seconds still holds.