Top Songs in Any Country: See What's #1 There on iPhone

The short answer

To see the top songs in another country on iPhone, open the free Trending Music app, go to the Search tab, scroll down to Charts and tap that heading. You get Charts by Country: 61 countries plus a Global chart. Pick one, then tap Daily Top Music Videos or Top 100 Music Videos to play it.

That is the whole trick. The rest of this guide is for the moment it is actually useful: you fly to Mexico City on Friday, and by Saturday night the taxi, the taco stand and the bar are all playing the same five songs. Everyone around you knows every word. You have never heard any of them.

Ten minutes with that country's chart the week before you go fixes that. So does a translate button on the lyrics, which we get to below.

Why your own app shows you the wrong chart

Every music app builds its home screen around the country your phone is in. That is what you want at home and exactly what you do not want before a trip, a visit to family abroad, or a first date with someone who grew up somewhere else.

If you already pay for Spotify or Apple Music, you have country charts too. Search Spotify for Top 50 Mexico, or Apple Music for Top 100: Mexico, and you get a playlist. Those count plays on that one service, and they are a perfectly good answer. There is no reason to install anything else if they cover the country you need.

The rest of this guide is for people who do not pay for a music subscription, or who want the YouTube picture of a country, which is what Trending Music shows.

Step by step in Trending Music

1. Open the Search tab (the magnifying glass in the tab bar). 2. Scroll down past Trending Songs, New Releases, the radio stations and Featured Playlists until you reach Charts. That row starts with your own country's charts. 3. Tap the word Charts itself (it has an arrow next to it). The Charts by Country screen opens. 4. Scroll the list, or type in the Search countries box at the top. Country codes work as well as names, so "jp", "mx" or "kr" jump straight there. 5. Tap a country, then tap one of its chart covers to open the song list. 6. Press play to start at number one, the shuffle button to mix it up, or tap any song to start there. 7. Tap the bookmark icon to add a copy of the chart to your Library, next to your playlists.

The bookmark takes a snapshot of the chart as it is that day. It does not update itself, which is handy if you want to remember what was playing on a trip, and less handy if you want this week's list: for that, open the country again.

Which chart should you open?

Most countries have two charts, and they answer different questions:

- Daily Top Music Videos: what people in that country played on YouTube in the last day. This is the one for "what is everybody playing right now", and it catches a song that blew up this week. - Top 100 Music Videos: YouTube's weekly chart for that country. It moves more slowly, so it also holds the songs that have been big for months, the ones you are most likely to hear in a bar or at a wedding.

A few countries have more. When we checked on 25 September 2026, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and South Korea also had Top 100 Live Performances, and the United States had eight genre charts on top of that: Country & Americana, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Dance & Electronic, Rock, Hard Rock & Metal, and Hip Hop, each a Top 50.

If you only have time for one, start with the weekly Top 100 and play it on shuffle.

What do these charts actually measure?

They are YouTube's own charts for each country, which the app loads and plays. So they count plays of music videos on YouTube by people in that country.

That makes them a different thing from Spotify's Top 50 or Billboard, which count streams on one service or combine sales, streams and radio play. The lists overlap a lot at the top and drift apart lower down. For working out what a country is listening to before you arrive, YouTube is a useful view because it is free and used almost everywhere. It is not an official national chart, and we would not quote it as one.

How do you understand a song in a language you don't speak?

Play the song, open the full player, and switch to Lyrics. Tap the globe button to the right of the Song / Video / Lyrics switch and pick one of two options:

- Translate to English puts an English line under each lyric. - Pronunciation guide puts the sounds in Latin letters under each line: romaji for Japanese, romanized Korean, pinyin for Chinese. It is how you learn to sing along to the chorus before you land.

The choice sticks from song to song until you switch it back to Original lyrics. The translation is done by AI, so slang and wordplay come out rough, English is the only language it translates into, and not every song has lyrics. More on the lyrics screen in our guide to seeing song lyrics on iPhone.

Is it free?

Yes. The country charts and the lyrics translation have no Premium lock. The free tier plays ads between songs and has a daily streaming limit, and the chart screens show a banner and an ad card in the list. Premium removes the ads.

Which countries are on the list?

61 countries plus Global, across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, including Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey and the UK. Several big music markets are missing, among them China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Greece. Type the name in the search box to check a country in a second.

What it will not do

Worth knowing before you plan a trip around it:

- Not every country. See the list above. For a country that is missing, the closest you will get is a live station from that country on the Radio tab. - Some countries come up empty. The charts come from YouTube, and when YouTube has no playable chart for a country, the screen stays blank. When we checked on 25 September 2026, Denmark and Kenya had nothing to play. - No city charts. Tokyo and Osaka get the same Japan chart. - No old charts. You see this week, not what was number one last summer. Bookmark a chart if you want to keep it. - Translation into English only, and as above, it is machine translation.

Before your trip

A week out, open the country, play its weekly Top 100 on shuffle while you pack, and heart the three or four songs that stick. Turn on the pronunciation guide for one chorus you want to be able to sing. Bookmark the chart so you can find that week's list again when you get home.

If you would rather hear the country the way locals do, with a presenter talking between songs in the local language, the Radio tab has live stations from almost every country.

Get Trending Music free on the App Store