Glee’s voices are set to soar again, Disney+ and Hulu announced on Wednesday (Oct. 21), after the streaming services gave co-creator Ryan Murphy a series order. The original Glee aired for six seasons, from 2009 to 2015, on Fox.
In addition to its TV run, the series achieved notable highlights — and set records — on Billboard’s charts.
The cast, largely at Glee’s start focusing on the high school-set show’s core show choir, New Directions, followed a unique strategy to achieve 207 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 — still the most among non-soloists. Multiple songs billed to the Glee Cast were released, on 20th Century Fox/Columbia Records, to accompany each new episode. Parlaying that onscreen reach, between May 2010 and March 2012, the act logged 15 weeks each with five debuts; four weeks each with six; and two weeks each with seven.
Even with 173 of the Glee Cast’s 207 Hot 100 hits having spent one week each on the chart, its songs have sold 48.4 million downloads in the United States, according to Luminate — and drawn 4.5 billion official U.S. streams.
Reflecting on the origin of Glee, Geoff Bywater, then head of 20th Century Fox Television’s music department, recalled projecting the series’ success to its respective executive producer and co-creator in a 2010 Billboard cover story: “I remember I talked to Dante Di Loreto and Ryan Murphy and said, ‘If all works well, we should see records in the top 10 and we should sell albums.’ ”
With those aspirations achieved and more, here’s a look at 10 of Glee’s top feats on multiple Billboard rankings.