Black Eyed Peas & J Balvin, “RITMO (Bad Boys For Life)” (Songs were eligible if they either were released or peaked on the Billboard charts in 2020 - unless, like “Watermelon Sugar” or “Don’t Start Now,” they already made our 2019 list.)ġ00. Here are the 100 songs we hope to remember it most by. Swift.Īnd as with all other things 2020, there’s one descriptor for the year in pop that, for better and worse, absolutely no one would argue with: unforgettable. And Billboard‘s new Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart demonstrated just how wide-ranging the genres had become, with chart-toppers from such increasingly unclassifiable artists as Juice WRLD, Billie Eilish, and indeed, Ms. Hip-hop’s billion dollar Babies ruled the summer with open-hearted hits that reflected unthinkably turbulent times while still sounding massive blaring out of car stereos. The uptempo revival that started to warm up on top 40 at the end of 2019 broke into a full-on sprint in early 2020, resulting in some of the best synth-pop and disco-based hits we’ve heard on the FM dial in ages. (And if you thought TikTok was influential before, that of course proved to be a gentle nudge compared to the full-body impact it flexed once the youth of America had less reason than ever not to spend all day on their phones.)īut even if 2020 proved to be a very strange place for pop music, it was also an undeniably fruitful one. 1s over the space of the year’s final nine months. (And then imagine trying to explain how a new video-sharing service called TikTok helped make it all happen.)Īnd oh yeah, there was that whole global shutdown thing that happened two and a half months into the year - which gave Taylor the time and space to record and release Folklore less than a year after her last LP, which made radio rally around the same handful of comfort-food pop hits to an unprecedented level, and which made the top of the Hot 100 chaotic enough that we had 20 different No. 1 of that month, and the No.1 bow for a previously unknown New Zealand teenager named Jawsh 365 - all on the same song. Imagine trying to explain to folks in 2015 that a half-decade later, we’d get Jason Derulo’s first No. Taylor Swift had the biggest album of the period with a surprise indie-folk LP, radio records were broken by The Weeknd (sure) and 24kGoldn and iann dior (more surprising), and Nicki Minaj finally scored the first Hot 100 chart-topper of her decade-plus of superstardom - only to score a second barely a month later. Well, it certainly was an unusual year for pop music, wasn’t it?