What was the best year for music?

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From the 60s to punk, acid house and Britpop, everyone has a favorite time in music.

But is there a single year that rock and pop peaked?

Maybe it came with The Beatles’ 1968 sonic experiments, or the mid-80s purple patch where Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson pushed themselves to ever-greater heights.

If you ask most people to choose a defining year in music, they will surely name one of their teenage years.

In adolescence, our brains are more active, we have more time to listen to music, and we are experiencing many things for the first time, all of which make the songs of that period more memorable.

When economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed Spotify’s data on people’s listening habits, he found that if you were a teenager when a hit song was released, it remained popular in your age group 10 years later.

Radiohead’s Creep, for example, is a favorite among men in their 40s. For 20-year-olds, it doesn’t even hit the top 300. For millennials, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe has a similar resonance.

But psychologists believe there is a deeper reason why we hold on to those pieces of music.

“It is during these formative years that we make many crucial life-changing decisions, initiate meaningful long-term relationships, and establish the cultural and political beliefs that shape our identity,” cognitive neuropsychologist Dr. Catherine Loveday told BBC Radio 3.

“Music has an intrinsic capacity to regulate emotions [so] these songs naturally become embedded in our important memories, both positive and negative. “

All of which is fascinating, but it still won’t help us empirically decide which year produced the best music. Fortunately, new research from the music industry body BPI helps narrow the field.

By analyzing all the music we aired in the UK last year, they have compiled a list of the most popular music year for each decade of the rock and roll era.

So now we know that people have a greater affinity for 1984 (Purple Rain, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go) than 1989 (Like A Prayer, Ride On Time). We also prefer the 1977 hits (We Will Rock You, Stayin ‘Alive) to the 1971 hits (Maggie May, Sweet Caroline).

2019 was the most popular year overall, but only because the hits on the current charts account for a fifth (21.1%) of all streaming activity.

Here are the top 10 songs from each of those eras, revealed exclusively on the BBC before they appear in the BPI yearbook: All About The Music 2020, which will be released later this month.

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Curiously, the most transmitted songs of those years do not always correlate with the hits of the time.

Wings’ Mull Of Kintyre, which was 1977’s best-selling single, is nowhere to be found for that year’s broadcast data.

Meanwhile, Smash Mouth’s All Star, which only peaked at number 24 in 1999, jumps to that year’s most-streamed list, having become a karaoke standard after appearing in the first Shrek movie.

The most played song of 1999, however, was the Toploader version of Dancing In The Moonlight.

“I think it is one of the happy songs,” said singer Joe Washbourne, explaining the song’s enduring success.

“It is still on the radio and is broadcast worldwide.

“People know the song more than the band, to be honest.”

Queen is well represented on the charts, thanks to the success of its Bohemian Rhapsody soundtrack, while The Beatles’ catalogs, Wham! and Fleetwood Mac are also still popular.

The songs released in 2019 were discounted to stop the recent hits flooding the dataset, but the late hit of the 2017 recordings by Lewis Capaldi, Tom Walker, and Lizzo (all of which hit the charts in the past 12 months) made that year the dominant one. player of the 2010s.

In a separate list of the most popular songs from last year, I She Care and Justin Bieber’s I Don’t Care rank first.

All top 10 were streamed more than 100 million times.

The popularity of the broadcast has been a lifeline for the music industry, after years of piracy and falling CD sales.

According to the Entertainment Retailers Association, people in the UK spent £ 1 billion on music subscriptions last year, an increase of 23.5%, and played a total of 114 billion songs.

In contrast, physical CD sales fell 17% to £ 318 million, two thirds less than the 2010 market of £ 873 million.

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