Over the last few months, we’ve taken quite a journey through the history of pop music and voted on every single song to ever reach #1 in the US, before ultimately naming “Satisfaction” as the Official SDMB-Approved Greatest #1 Jam of All Time. One of the consistent complaints from posters in our threads, however, has been that there are so many songs that were huge in their day and charted highly, but never made it to #1, because they were eclipsed by a slightly bigger song, or because there was just too much competition, or simply because The World Was Not Ready. I wanted to find a way to look at the rest of the top 40, but going week-by-week and looking at every song just wasn’t practical, so I now introduce our new year-by-year retrospective series; The Best of the Rest of the Top 40!
For this poll, we’ll be using the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 - a chart published in December every year and rating the top songs in sales+airplay over the past 52 weeks. (Due to the lead time in publishing the year-end issue, Billboard’s “year” typically ends on the third week of November.) We’ll be looking at the top 40 positions on the chart, and, to avoid duplicating the results of our previous series, we will be leaving out any song that made #1 in that year or any other year.
1956 is the first year in which Billboard published a sales+airplay year-end chart, so, much as we did with the #1 series, we’ll be starting there. Excluding the songs that made it to #1, we have 27 options on this list. What’s your favorite?
Best #1 single polls: 1955-56 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s All-time
