SONGLYRICS.com presents the Top 100 Songs of All Time. Updated with the latest releases and song lyrics.

Photo Credit: Unsplash The 40 most popular songs on YouTube have been revealed. Unsurprisingly, songs released in the 2010s took the top spots for ‘most popular songs’ on the list.Interestingly enough, only one song from the ’80s and ’90s crossed the one billion streams threshold ⁠— both songs. Every single song on the list in the 2010s achieved at least two billion streams.Guns N’ Roses, Michael Jackson, Linkin Park, Katy Perry, and Ed Sheeran all have at least two songs in this most popular songs list. The most popular song on the entire list was Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” which has achieved over six billion streams since it released in 2017.

That’s a powerful boost from the “” meme. Rick Astley – “Never Gonna Give You Up”39. Michael Jackson – “Thriller”38. Bon Jovi – “Livin’ On A Prayer”37. Bonnie Tyler – “Total Eclipse of the Heart”36. Aqua – “Barbie Girl”35. Snoop Dogg – “Still D.R.E.”34.

Backstreet Boys – “I Want It That Way”33. Europe – “The Final Countdown”32. The Police – “Every Breath You Take”31. Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”30. No Doubt – “Don’t Speak”29. Scorpions – “Wind of Change”28. 4 Non Blondes – “What’s Up”27.

Cyndi Lauper – “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”26. 50 Cent – “In Da Club”25. Whitney Houston – “I Will Always Love You”24. Linkin Park – “In The End”23.

System of a Down – “Chop Suey!”22. Chris Brown – “Loyal”21. Katy Perry – “Hot N Cold”20. Beyonce – “Halo”19. A-ha – “Take On Me”18. The Cranberries – “Zombie”17.

Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”16. Taylor Swift – “You Belong With Me”15.

Guns N’ Roses – “Sweet Child of Mine”14. Lady Gaga – “Bad Romance”13. Guns N’ Roses – “November Rain”12.

Linkin Park – “Numb”11. Axel F – “Crazy Frog”10. Ed Sheeran – “Thinking Out Loud”9. OneRepublic – “Counting Stars”8.

Katy Perry – “Roar”7. Maroon 5 – “Sugar”6. Justin Bieber – “Sorry”5. PSY – “Gangnam Style”4. Mark Ronson – “Uptown Funk”3.

Wiz Khalifa ft. Charlie Puth – “See You Again”2. Ed Sheeran – “Shape of You”1. Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee – “Despacito”.

For a multi-billion dollar industry, popular music gets a bad rap.Pop music is often derided as insipid and endlessly recycled, and critics of the Top 40 often suggest that the key to making a hit is to copy and paste an earlier success with nothing more than some superficial variation. But recent research suggests that the opposite may be true.In their paper “,” professors of Columbia Business School and of INSEAD analyzed 60 years worth of tracks from the Billboard Hot 100, and found that the songs that chart highest tend to be less similar to their predecessors. When it comes to getting to the top of the charts, it pays to be different — though not too different.“Breakout songs — those that reach the very top of the charts — simultaneously conform to prevailing musical feature profiles while exhibiting some degree of individuality or novelty,” Mauskapf and Askin explain. “They sound similar to whatever else is popular at the time, but also have enough of a unique sound to help them stand out as distinctive.”“What that suggests,” the researchers conclude, “is that a hit song, or any other cultural product – like a film, or a novel — can’t simply be reverse engineered from what’s been popular in the past. Popular success really is more art than science.”. New genres rarely emerge out of a vacuum — they evolve out of other genres, and “Love Train” probably has more in common with the Philadelphia Soul tracks that came before it — themselves an evolution of the Motown sound — than with the disco tracks of a few years later.Notably, the song lacks the high danceability and energy common to most later disco songs.

This is especially evident in the relatively milquetoast percussion.The most atypical attributes identified by the algorithm — high instrumentalness and no acousticness — are questionable. This isn't an instrumental track (and doesn't even feature any signficant instrumental sections), and while there are clearly some electric guitars involved, it otherwise sounds pretty acoustic, with no traces of the drum machines or synthesizers that were soon to come. Hard rock is a perfect example of a genre whose songs are defined by their energy - noisy and strident, and filled with colossal guitar solos and hard percussion - without necessarily being danceable.Hard rock songs also often score high on liveness. Of course, almost none of the versions of these songs that played on the radio would have actually been recorded live, but there's a rawness to the production that gives it a live feel.Bon Jovi's follow-up single, “Livin’ On A Prayer,” also went to #1, and features a similar profile of high energy and liveness, contrasted with low valence and danceability. The golden age of hip hop may have been during the late 80's and early 90's, but the Billboard Hot 100 was a bit slow to catch up.Before the mid-90's, #1 songs featuring rap were rare, and often novelties (“Baby Got Back,” for example, and “Ice Ice Baby”), or pop songs with rap elements (e.g., Paula Abdul's “Opposites Attract,” or Blondie's 1981 song “Rapture,” often cited as the first Billboard #1 song to include rap).“Hypnotize” hit number 1 in 1997, shortly after Notorious B.I.G.'

S untimely death. “Drop It Like It's Hot” shares many characteristics with the previous hip-hop number ones we've seen: high speechiness and danceability and a slow tempo.But it stands out for having incredibly low energy. Listening to the song, this feels like an accurate assessment. The mood is laid-back, Snoop Dogg's delivery is casually cocky, and, above all, the production, courtesy of The Neptunes, is starkly minimalist. The song features some oddball percussion (notably including tongue clicks) some restrained, occasional synths, and beneath it all, what sounds like the persistent hiss of a white noise machine. And that's about all.The mid 2000's also saw a few pop stars reach number 1 with songs featuring quasi-rap elements.

For example, Gwen Stefani's 2005 hit “Hollaback Girl” – the shouty vocals of which probably owe more to Toni Basil than N.W.A. This pop oddity is another Neptunes production. “Royals” has been described as “minimalist pop,” and its sonic attributes match that description well. AppendixData is courtesy of. Sonic attribute data ultimately originates from Spotify's.The paper on which this is based, “What Makes Popular Culture Popular?

Product Features and Optimal Differentiation in Music,” uses a few additional attributes from Echo Nest not shown here, namely the song's key, its mode (major or minor), and its time signature. (As categorical attributes, these would have been difficult to incorporate into the visualizations shown here.)For the sake of simplicity, I manually corrected the tempo of two of the example songs visualized above (“Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” and “Love Takes Time”) to 1/2 of the algorithmically inferred tempo. Exploring the full catalog of number ones, you may still notice a few examples of songs whose detected tempo is half or double what it should be (such as “Hey Jude”).The code for this essay is available on GitHub.