An Update Before the Top Ten Best Hit Songs of 2025
Hey, guys. 2026 is upon us, which means it’s almost time for me to get to work on my list of my favorite hit songs of 2025.
As people who have read this blog for the past few years likely know, I make these posts ahead of working on the actual lists because changes made from year to year are seemingly inevitable these days. And, yep, you guessed it, things are changing yet again. Two years ago, I changed my eligibility rules. Last year, I changed the list’s structure. This year, I’m changing both
Now, you may remember that the last time that I changed my eligibility rules was for my list in 2023. That was the year that Billboard decided to abbreviate their tracking year to cut off in mid-October to align with their award show and give us a 49-week year. This prompted me to also consider songs that would have made the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 if it were tracked from January to December eligible for this list, which I considered to be a good fix, and it worked well for that year and for 2024. In both years, there was a reasonable amount of movement on the charts and plenty of great songs to choose from, so it worked well. However, 2025 will need to be treated differently. Not that it was a bad year, necessarily, as I found plenty of great songs this year that I’m eager to highlight. However, this year will probably go down as one of the most stagnant years for mainstream American pop music since the Billboard charts were created nearly seventy years ago.
I realize that this is a lofty statement, especially coming from someone who is only twenty years old, has only followed the charts since late 2017, and doesn’t really know much about what the charts looked like before 2010 or so. But, speaking as someone who followed the charts week-to-week and who compiled predictions for what the end-of-year charts would look like, this year’s mainstream music scene moved slowly. Once a song hit it big, it stayed on top forever. Don’t believe me? Using the official end-of-year charts, the four biggest hits of 2024 - “Lose Control”, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, “Beautiful Things”, and “I Had Some Help” - were the fourth, third, sixth, and eighth biggest hits of 2025, respectively. The year’s official Billboard Year-End #1 song was “Die With A Smile”, which already ranked at #62 the previous year. Out of all of the songs on the official year-end chart, 20 of them were on last year’s list. Out of all of the songs on my January-December list that I compiled, 24 of them were on 2024’s version of that list. So, how do I plan to remedy this? Let me explain.
For starters, the old rules will still remain part of my eligibility criteria. Any song that made either the 2025 Billboard Year-End Hot 100 or the version of the list that I calculate which tracks the charts from January to December, is eligible as long as it wasn’t eligible for any previous year’s list. However, I will also be returning to an aspect of my rules that I last used in 2022. Any song that would have made either chart if repeats and holiday songs were excluded is also going to be eligible for this list. So, here are the songs that, based on my calculations, would have made the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 if that were the case.
Note: any songs in red are still deemed ineligible for this list on account of being eligible for last year’s list.
Okay, now that we got that out of the way, here's what the January-December version of the end-of-year charts looks like under my calculations.
Note: songs that are ineligible are shown in red, and songs that did not make the official Billboard Year-End Hot 100, but made this list, are shown in blue.
And, of course, here’s the extension of songs that are now eligible under my new rules:
And, finally, one last thing regarding eligibility rules. Any songs that hit #1 on the Hot 100 are also going to be eligible from now on. So, there is one more eligible song that has not already been mentioned.
This will also extend to my International Hits segment. Now, in addition to any song that makes the end-of-year charts for Canada, the Billboard Global 200 and the United Kingdom being eligible, any non-holiday song that hits #1 on any of those charts will be eligible for the segment as well.
And, now, the final thing of note - how the structure of the list will change. I’m not repeating the top twenty list from last year, and I’m sticking to a top ten list. Doing a top twenty list took a really long time last year, and I feel as though I bit off more than I could chew with that. Ten songs is easier for me, as I can more easily focus on highlighting a smaller number of great songs and doing my best to write about them.
I realize that this was a long-winded post with a lot of information. In any case, I’ll get to work on the list properly in the new year. I hope that you enjoy reading it when it comes out!
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