The 50 Most Popular Tracks of the Last Decades According to Spotify

Streaming services measure the most important metric - the number of user listens. For example, Yandex. Music shares playlists with the most listened to songs of the year, and Spotify allows you to find out which songs of the last decades are the most popular now. The publication of The Pudding was engaged in the study of this data. And we share a selection of the most popular tracks released from 1950 to 2005, and analyze the main conclusions from the data obtained.

Most Popular Recordings 1950-2005

The period was not chosen by chance: it was in the 1950s that the Billboard Hot 100 hit parade appeared, with the data of which The Pudding correlates the obtained statistics on the number of listens. The aim of the study was to find out how old songs gain and lose popularity over time, so the interval is limited to 2005. Here are the tracks that are listened to most often, arranged in descending order:

Listen on Apple Music →

Listen on Google Play →

Recall that Spotify is not officially available in Russia, so this collection helps to track global, but not Russian trends.

If with the long-held Billboard Hot 100 Lose Yourself and the record holder Last.fm Mr. Brightside is more or less clear, then it gets more interesting. For example, the most popular song of the 1980s was Journey's Don’t Stop Believin. Moreover, in 1981, the track could not rise above the ninth position on the Billboard Hot 100.

The situation with the popular tracks of the 90s is even more curious. The single Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana peaked at # 42 on the Billboard charts in 1991 and now surpasses all tracks of the 90s by 15 million plays (as of 2014).

What now?

Also The Pudding paid attention to the popularity of the tracks in recent years. For example, they compared the statistics of listening to hits from 2013: Daft Punk - Get Lucky, Lana Del Rey - Young and Beautiful and Arctic Monkeys - Do I Wanna Know. It turned out that the hit of the French raised the bar in terms of the number of auditions in the first months after the release, but within six months the results were ⅕ of the previous records.

Now this is not at all important, because the singles of Lana Del Rey and Arctic Monkeys, with a modest start, have reached about the same mark and are holding on to it no less confidently.

After a dozen years, no one can remember about this gap of three worthy singles.

This year, one of the leaders of the Billboard Hot 100 was the track Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. Personally, I have no doubts that in a couple of years the number of listens to this hit will be negligible.

Afterword

More and more people are using streaming services, which means that soon we will receive even more accurate data. It is already clear that today's popularity is not a guarantee of long-term success. Time is the best critic and reviewer. Therefore, if your efforts are not appreciated, think about it. Perhaps you are just ahead of your time.