Billboard Hot 100's All-Time Top 10 Songs

Lots of Surprises in 50th-Anniversary List of Most Popular Songs

Sep 13, 2008

Billboard Magazine marked the 50th anniversary of its Hot 100 chart by issuing the All-Time Hot 100 List: the most popular songs of the last 50 years.

The All-Time Top 10 list included quite a few surprising entries, starting with the #1 song, the Twist, by Chubby Checker. Checker himself felt vindicated by the honor. "I'm glad they've finally recognized it," said Checker of his early 1960s hit. "Anyplace on the planet, when someone has a song that has a beat, they're on the floor dancing apart to the beat, and before Chubby Checker, it wasn't here, and I think that has a lot to do with me being on the charts," he said.

The All-Time Top 10 Songs List

No Elvis Presley? No Elton John?

The fact that Elvis Presley didn’t make the list at all and the Beatles didn’t break into the top five, losing out to one-hit wonders like “The Macarena” and “You Light up My Life,” raised eyebrows among commentators reacting to the list.

Other popular songs that didn’t make the Top 10 list also include Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” the best-selling single ever, which was No. 1 for 14 weeks in 1997, and The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody,” whose long history on the pop charts included appearances both in 1964 and in 1990, when the movie "Ghost" brought it back to popularity.

Presley’s absence can be attributed in part to the fact that the Hot 100 debuted midway through his career, after he recorded “Hound Dog,” “Don’t be Cruel, and “Jailhouse Rock.” And while the Beatles only appeared on the All-Time Top 10 songs list at No. 8, they did rank No. 1 on Billboard’s list of All-Time Top Artists, followed by Madonna, Elton John, and Elvis Presley.

Hot 100 Measures Popularity by Both Radio Play and Sales

After nearly twenty years of tracking songs by record sales and jukebox play, Billboard launched a new approach in August of 1958. The Hot 100 chart uses a formula based on sales and radio play to measure a song’s popularity.

Songs were chosen for the All-Time Top 10 list according a formula based on their stay on the chart, with weeks at No. 1 earning higher values than weeks at No. 100. The formula was also adjusted to account for differences in the way song sales have been tracked over the decades.

Other Billboard 50th-Anniversary Lists

Billboard published a number of other Hot 100 lists that are sure to spark arguments among music fans, including lists of the all-time rock songs, Latin songs, country songs, and R&B/hip-hop songs.

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