Two years ago I started a journey to determine what the most popular songs of all-time were based on a system that I created to keep track of the Billboard charts. I began at the very first week of the Billboard Hot 100, which was August 1958, and went week by week giving points to the songs that made the top 10. I gave ten points to the No. 1 song, nine points to the No. 2 song and so on down to giving one point to the No. 10 song. Every week. Every year. Every decade. From 1958 to the present day. These are the final results. And this list is through 2016 as I let each song from 2016 finish out its time in the top 10 before creating the final list.
Is this the absolute perfect system? Probably not. Were there faster and more efficient ways of finding out the top songs of all-time? Probably. For one, I could've gone and looked at Billboard's own list at Billboard.com and been satisfied. But that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to figure out how things would turn out if I did it my way. And I'm glad I did because this whole process has helped educate me on the history of music and now I have Excel charts for each year and each decade in Billboard history that are fun to look through. No regrets.
I will also be the first to admit that this may not be the most accurate list ever done. For one, I don't have access to actual chart points from Billboard that determined their positioning in the first place. Two, I only kept track of the top 10 instead of the whole Hot 100 because I decided the latter would take up too much time. If you want to go to Billboard.com and look at their official list, you are more than welcome to do so. But I hope you'll have fun look through my version as well.
It's also worth noting that once I came up with the final list, I did a bit of adjusting to make things fair. Music is always changing and evolving as is the way we listen to and purchase music. As such, Billboard is always doing their best to adjust to the times as they are always changing and updating their own formula for the Hot 100. Because of these factors, it would be unfair to do an apples-to-apples comparison with this final list. The most notable example of these changes came in 1991 with the formation of the Nielsen SoundScan, which was a much more accurate and effective way of keeping track of sales and what not. This resulted in songs staying on the charts longer. Before 1991, only two songs in Billboard history were No. 1 for 10 or more weeks. From 1992 to today, there's been 32. This is because the average number of weeks that a song spent in the top 10 from 1958 to 1991 was only 5.3 weeks, while from 1992 to 2012 that increased to 8.9 weeks. From 2013 through 2016 that increased 11 weeks with the addition of YouTube and other streaming services to the formula starting in 2013.
Thus it's less impressive in my mind when someone like Ed Sheeran accomplishes this feat today as compared to when Debby Boone accomplished this for the first time in 1977 or Olivia Newton-John a few years later. So I did some adjusting. Essentially I did some Excel formulas that compared each song to its own time period. Again, perhaps not the perfect system. But it's a lot better than revealing the non-adjusted list wherein almost every entry would be post-1991.
With all that out of the way, it's time to finally reveal this list that I've been building up to these past two years. As I've done with my decades lists, I will be revealing this 10 songs at a time over the next week and a half or so. Links are at the bottom for you to browse through each section of the list. Or you can simply use the blog archive on the right. Let's begin!
100- "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" - The Platters (1958)
99- "Honky Tonk Women" - The Rolling Stones (1969)
98- "Sugar Shack" - Jimmy Gilmer and The Fireballs (1963)
97- "Maria Maria" - Santana featuring The Product G&B (2000)
96- "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" - Queen (1980)
95- "When Doves Cry" - Prince and The Revolution (1984)
(Note: This video is a cover since it's still hard to find genuine Prince music on YouTube due to copyright, even though his music has finally shown up on streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify following his death. It's a pretty good cover, though)
94- "(Everything I Do) I Do it For You" - Bryan Adams (1991)
93- "Another Night" - Real McCoy (1994)
92- "All About that Bass" - Meghan Trainor (2014)
91- "Do that to Me One More Time" - Captain & Tennille (1979)
Click here for 90 - 81
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