By Anton Dedvukaj
So, now that 2020 is finally over, the music industry have released their annual Year End Lists.
Billboard magazine, the industry standard in the United States, released their year end charts in early December, with charts including the Hot 100 songs, Billboard 200 albums, the Artist 100, and several other genre-based charts. I feel as though these charts are a very good representation of what music was most popular in 2020, so here are some of my findings from looking through these charts.
First off, who were the big winners? Well, let’s start off with the top song of the year, which was The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”. The R&B/synth-pop track spent four weeks at number one on the Hot 100 in the spring, and remains very popular even today, ranking at No. 11 on this week’s Hot 100. Right behind it were two other number-one singles, Post Malone’s “Circles” and Roddy Ricch’s “The Box”, at numbers two and three respectively. Now, looking at the top 10, I noticed a few things.
Namely, I noticed that only two of the songs in the top ten, DaBaby & Roddy Ricch’s “Rockstar” (No. 5), and Future & Drake’s “Life Is Good” (No. 7), were actually released in 2020. In fact, two of the songs in the top 10 were present on last year’s Year End Hot 100, being “Circles” and Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved”, the latter of which was released in 2018. I’ve said before that 2020 will inevitably go down as an all-around terrible year for world events, so maybe this was a result of people searching for escapism. Of course, with many of these songs having been released in the last months of 2019, this may not be the case, but I still find it fairly telling.
Looking at the rest of the Year End, this theory seems to carry a fair bit more weight, with many 2019 hits having made the list as well. For example, Chris Brown & Drake’s “No Guidance”, Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello’s “Señorita”, Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy”, SHAED’s “Trampoline”, Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts”, Lil Nas X’s “Panini”, and the Jonas Brothers’ “Only Human” all made the list despite being fairly prevalent 2019 hits.
Of course, there’s always songs that make multiple year-end lists for different years, but with so many of the mid-to-late 2019 hits sticking around long enough to outperform several fairly popular 2020 hits, maybe the theory of escapism has more credibility than it may seem.
Now, as far as which genres did well, it seems as though rap and pop continued their dominance into this year, which should come as no surprise, given that those two being the most popular genres has been true for some time now.
However, other genres had fairly successful years as well. For example, there was R&B. In addition to “Blinding Lights” becoming the first R&B song to top the year end in six years, there were a few other songs from that genre in the top 40. Doja Cat’s “Say So”, Justin Bieber & Quavo’s “Intentions”, The Weeknd’s “Heartless”, Lizzo’s “Good as Hell”, and Chris Brown & Young Thug’s “Go Crazy” all finished among the top 40 songs of the year, with “No Guidance” also making the year-end top 40 for the second year in a row. This is a significant improvement for the genre over 2019, which only had four R&B songs make the entire year-end Hot 100.
Another genre which saw improvement this year in terms of chart performance was country. In fact, there were two country songs that made the year-end top 20, with Maren Morris’ “The Bones” and Gabby Barrett & Charlie Puth’s “I Hope” ranking there. In fact, “The Bones” made the year-end top 10 and No. 9, despite the fact that it never reached the Hot 100’s top 10, which I found to be interesting. Eighteen country songs made the year-end, and while this is only a slight improvement over last year’s 15, the fact that there were multiple songs from the genre in the top 20, when last year old had one in the top 40, shows signs of improvement in chart performance.
Finally, you could even argue that rock and alternative music had an increase in popularity this year, but this growth comes with a huge asterisk. In the middle of the year, Billboard changed the rules of its rock charts to allow alternative songs to chart there. This allowed songs like 24kGoldn and Iann Dior’s “Mood”, Juice WRLD and Marshmello’s “Come & Go”, Billie Eilish’s “Everything I Wanted”, Tones And I’s “Dance Monkey”, and Powfu and Beabadoobee’s “Death Bed” to rank among the biggest rock and alternative songs of the year. So while this year’s six songs representing this chart were an improvement over last year’s two, this should be taken with a grain of salt.
Finally, do I feel as though these charts accurately represent the taste of the American public this year? Well, I’d say so. In the past few years, we’ve seen the charts more consumer-driven than ever before, even if the radio still has a large presence in determining what gets big. Even still, looking at the biggest of the big, I’d say the large majority of these songs had some form of an audience they appealed to, justifying their placement on the list. The only exceptions to this are possibly the low-ranking country songs, but this may be due to the fact that I live in an area where country isn’t consumed as much as rap or pop. I enjoyed a good amount of the songs that got big this year, and would say that this was a good year for the charts, and it certainly was an interesting one as well. And if there’s anything that defines this awful, awful year known as 2020, “interesting” is a good adjective to go along with it.
