So the only hard-and-fast qualification we laid down for songs to be eligible for our list was that they had to have hit the Hot 100 at some point, in some version. There are common elements to a lot of the biggest pop songs, but at the end of the day, “pop” means “popular” first and foremost, and just about any song that becomes popular enough - whether it be rock, dance, rap, R&B, country, reggaetón or some combination - can be considered a pop song. How are we defining “pop songs,” you might ask? Well, that’s a little tough: One of the reasons pop can be hard to summarize is because there’s no real sonic or musical definition to it. (Because 500 is a much smaller number than you think when talking about 65 years of pop music, and because we wanted to be able to include as many different artists as possible, we capped the number of pop songs per lead artist at three.) Though songs had to hail from the Hot 100 era to qualify for our list, this isn’t a charts-determined ranking: Rather, these are the songs our staff felt were simply the greatest, most enduring pop songs of that 65-year period, the songs that we most think of when we think of what pop music could and should be. So we here at Billboard have decided to take the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Billboard Hot 100 - with the chart finally having lived a full-enough life to be at retirement age, though it’s still as vital as ever and certainly nowhere near hanging it up - to take our shot at listing the 500 best pop songs since the chart’s debut. It shouldn’t be possible for the biggest music on the planet to be overlooked, but it does feel that way sometimes.

There’s no official pop hall of fame, like there is for those other genres. While rock as a genre has been listed and anthologized to death over the past 50 years, and hip-hop and country are finally starting to catch up, such pop histories are relatively few and far between.

There is no safer bet, no easier sell than pop music.Īnd yet, there’s been relatively little attempt to properly canonize modern pop’s greatest works and practitioners. It’s why wedding receptions are usually joyous and celebratory occasions even if the DJ doesn’t know a thing about the people they’re playing to, why karaoke can feel like a spiritual awakening in the right circumstances, why top 40 and oldies radio remain cultural staples a decade into the streaming era.

It’s our shared language, our communal experience. Pop is the backbone not only of the music industry, but of culture in general: Nothing else connects people, defines moments and lives and passes down history from generation to generation the way pop does.

Song love you for a thousand years