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| - ITunes charts calculate the number of people who download the song through iTunes. They do not account for streaming numbers through platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music.
On Jan. 28, 2026, rock musician Bruce Springsteen released a protest song titled "Streets of Minneapolis." The song's lyrics unflinchingly described what Springsteen called "state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis," in the form of a massive presence of federal agents, who fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, that month.
On social media, posts claimed the song had quickly rocketed to the top of the charts. According to images on Facebook, "Streets of Minneapolis" reached No. 1 on iTunes charts in 19 countries, mainly across North America and Europe. Snopes readers emailed us asking to confirm the song's success.
ITunes charts change rapidly, meaning that the charts we investigated were almost certainly different from the charts when the posts making the claim initially appeared on Jan. 29. However, as of this publication, we found evidence confirming "Streets of Minneapolis" was the No. 1 downloaded song on iTunes in at least 21 countries for a brief period of time.
An important caveat here is that iTunes charts do not include data from streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. They count only the number of times a song has been purchased and downloaded through the iTunes platform.
First, Snopes found news articles from Forbes (Jan. 29) and NBC (Jan. 30) documenting that "Streets of Minneapolis" had hit No. 1 on iTunes in the United States.
A listicle from USA Today published Jan. 29 also claimed the song was No. 1 on iTunes in 19 countries. Those countries were:
Australia
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Austria
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Belgium
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Canada
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Denmark
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Finland
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France
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Germany
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Ireland
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Italy
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Luxembourg
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Netherlands
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New Zealand
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Norway
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Spain
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Sweden
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Switzerland
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United Kingdom
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United States
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That list exactly aligned with the chart success suggested by the social media posts.
Snopes also reviewed charts from Jan. 29 and Jan. 30 through several different charting aggregate sites, including Kworb, Chartoo, iTunesCharts.net and iTopChart.com. Such aggregates collect their data directly from Apple using its online API. We checked as many sites as possible in the hopes that some of them had captured data at different times, in case songs changed position in the rankings throughout the day.
That proved worthwhile, because some sites showed "Streets of Minneapolis" dropping to No. 2 in Australia sometime on Jan. 30, while Kworb's data also noted that the song had hit No. 1 in Czechia and Greece.
In sum, between Jan. 28, when Springsteen released the song, and the time of publication, "Streets of Minneapolis" was at some point the most-downloaded song on iTunes in at least 21 different countries.
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