a long incoherent rant about billboard's 2023 year-end hot 100 

My favorite part of this year end is that you can see the Global Excl US year end and without the American Exceptionalism Last Night is at #160 behind Rolling In The Deep, a song from 2011

It’s basically 2018 if you replace xans with whiskey and Drake with Wallen

Switch your thoughts on I’m Good and Calm Down (“Cam Down” 😂) and you get MY opinions on those songs (except I’ll go a step further and say I’m Good is maybe one of the worst songs to ever be on a billboard year end; Cam Down is alright)

I think it's important for usefulness and historical reasons to include TTIAST, the year end is generally meant to track what the songs with the most points are (I get there are many nuances in that though), manually excluding a song for the racist content would be against that goal, and also would be erasing the shameful sides of American pop

Hey finn, love ur content. Just wanted to say since there seemed to be some confusion, songs that made the YE this year is from the points it accumulated over the weeks. There are predictions accounts that take into the points of each week and ended up somewhat accurately predicting what the YE ended up looking like so billboard wasn't taking any liberties in moving songs around. (Alot of the songs you had questions about like lift me up was helped by the fact the YE starts in November and had a huge radio run) The mess from this year really was that billboard cut off the YE early this year (only 49 weeks as opposed to 52) so that's where a lot of the controversy around them shortining it this year lol Otherwise yeah tended to agree about the quality though

I live in Hungary and for a good chunk of my youth, my exposure to music were from TV shows/movies, songs that my dad showed me and the radio. I can count on my hand of the number of country songs I've heard in my life at that point. The only reason I even know the existence of people like Morgen Wallen, Kane Brown, Jason Aldean, etc is because music reviewers and constant discourse about country. I somewhat like country but for once, I'm glad I live in Hungary.

I might have to end up using other Charts not just restricting my Range to Billboard for 2021 and forward And This Year end Has 5 CHRISTMAS SONGS!

I actually really liked this year end list, and I like every song in the YE Top 10 (yes, even I'm Good (Blue), Last Night, and Calm Down). The biggest difference between us seems to be that to enjoyed (with a couple glaring exceptions) almost all of the country hits this year and I was glad to see the genre have such a huge presence in 2023

I think that we’re returning to the early 2000s style of the year-end list where irrelevant songs nobody will remember 6 months from now are topping the list, songs that peaked below #5 could ended up so high on the list just because they were dragged by the radio for months and stayed on the hot 100 for the entire fucking year, and the actual songs that people actually cares and remember got pushed aside to the lower half of the list or just not on the list at all

I must agree, this year was really dead for music. I think even billboard stopped caring which is why rich flex is in top 20 of year end. i never remember that being that big at all and died out not too long after its peak

the best genres this year were pop, R&B, and K-Pop surprisingly. Everything else (trap rap, country, Latin, Mexican) has been so mediocre the past year

2023 was one of the most frustrating years for mainstream music in the last few years. I originally thought it could've been a decent year, but with this top 100 list out it was very disappointing. Music was almost completely ignorable and very few interesting moments actually happened that even its biggest songs aren't even anywhere near as big as past years. It's held up by it's variety and that it's good songs are fantastic, but even that can't save how mediocre and bland this year end feels. I really hope 2024 will provide us with better music.

Well, tbf, Billboard screwed up the tracking year more than usual. If the chart had actually run from the beginning to end of 2023, the songs from this that would have missed would be: -Ain't That Some -Bad Habit -Bloody Mary -BZRP Music Sessions, Vol. 53 -I Like You (A Happier Song) -I Wrote the Book -Lift Me Up -Nobody Gets Me -PRC -Put it On Da Floor Again -Super Freaky Girl -Tomorrow 2 -Wait For U -What My World Spins Around -Wild As Her 15% difference. And out of all of those, the only one I'd miss that didn't also make 2022 is Nobody Gets Me (sorry, the BZRP song is annoying to me). Now, for the songs that would have replaced them... -Agora Hills -Bad Idea Right? -First Person Shooter -Good Good -Greedy -IDGAF -I Know? -Lady Gaga -Lovin On Me -Rich Baby Daddy -Save Me -Truck Bed -Used to Be Young -Water -White Horse Obviously, they're not all winners (the Drake songs and Truck Bed all blow), but for only giving up a good SZA song, we get White Horse, Bad Idea Right, Water, Used to Be Young, Good Good and Agora Hills. Six songs that are all best list-worthy.

The main issue with the list is that it's such a chaotic mess that it comes across like the result of someone going through every song that charted in 2023 and picking 100 of them at random. But the amount of songs on here that are actually good is pretty high

This year for pop music can go eat a bag of rusty nails

Some footage got corrupted in rendering, but it is representative of the effort I put into it, so...

I feel like the reason why TTIAST lasted long enough to make the YE list, was actually because of radio airplay. After the controversy the streaming and sales depleted, but country radio was just pushing this song along like it was any other generic Aldean country-rock bullshit. They were complicit in making people hear that piece of shit every day in certain parts of the US. It's the early 2000s all over again.

I looked into how this list was compiled because I agree there were some songs on here that felt like they were flops that somehow made the list, it turns out billboard only tracked sales/streaming forms November last year to October this year, making this the shortest year they've tracked for the year end list as they normally include data from early November on these lists. I honestly stopped caring about year end lists for about a decade now, although this is easily the worst year end list ever due to how homogenised it is with boring country music and whatever gets big on tik tok. The former seems to only be popular due to culture war bullshit whilst the latter is just low effort virality that like you said, won't be remembered this time next year.

I never understood the appeal of Morgan Wallen. Last Night is the music equivalent of bland spaghetti.

Would you say that this year was as bad, or worse, than other years like 2018, 2016, 2009, or 2006? I personally wouldn't go nearly that far, but I would love to hear your thoughts.

But have you concidered that Jason Isbell IS everything wrong with country?

God what a shit year end and I thought last year was mid