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The days are shorter, the nights are colder and the trees are bare. Inside, fireplaces are crackling to shield loved ones from the chilly air. When winter makes its way back around, sunny days can sometimes feel like distant, made-up memories.
While the gloom can lead to long hours inside as you avoid muddy snow and frostbitten fingers, those languid evenings can transform into quite the cozy affair, given the right soundtrack. That’s why Billboard has put together a list of 26 essential tracks for your wintertime listening pleasure.
We know December marks the beginning of celebrations for “the most wonderful time of the year.” But a good winter playlist goes beyond Christmas trees and jingling bells. The mix should be one you’d listen to all season long — weeks and months after unwrapping your final gift. So no, you won’t find Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” nor any of your holiday favorites below (for that, you can check out Billboard’s Greatest of All Time Holiday 100 list based on our charts).
Keep reading to discover tunes consistent with the mood shift that — for many of us — rolls in with the cold front. The increased time spent with our own thoughts brings on a brooding self-reflection that can feel as comforting as it can feel overwhelming. Artists from Taylor Swift to Bob Dylan to The Weeknd have captured that feeling, crafting riveting wintery melodies ideal for introspection, whether you’re curled up with your favorite blanket or venturing out into the snow.
Few artists have earned the chart hits, fan support and critical acclaim that Taylor Swift enjoys. Emerging as a country singer-songwriter on her 2006 self-titled debut before branching out into the worlds of pop music, indie folk and beyond, Swift has notched eight No. 1s on the Billboard Hot 100, inspired a dedicated legion of Swifties and won the Grammy for album of the year three times — for Fearless, 1989 and Folklore; She is just the fourth person, and the first woman, to win that prestigious Grammy three times.
In 2019, Swift was honored as Billboard‘s first ever Woman of the Decade at our 2019 Women In Music event, not just for her commercial success, but for her commitment to protecting creative rights, music education, literacy programs, cancer research, disaster relief and the Time’s Up initiative.
Here are the 40 biggest Taylor Swift songs, based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 (through the chart dated December 17, 2022).
Trying to capture what a “queer song” sounds like in 2022 is a lot like trying to explain what the color yellow is — all in all, it’s not possible. That’s because, simply put, songs by queer artists released throughout 2022 run the gamut of popular music, from thundering electro-pop, to sultry R&B, to funkwave, hip-hop, Latin, indie rock, disco and much more. Gone are the days where openly-LGBTQ people — both artists and listeners — were siloed off into one stereotypical genre landscape, now replaced by an audience who are listening to a vast array of musical genres, and a bevy of artists ready to show off their skills in nearly every musical field.
The result of that evolution is not only a diverse landscape of music created by queer artists, but a new frontier of pathways toward success. Along with showing off the musical flexibility of a community trying to survive amidst less-than-ideal circumstances, 2022 also proved that massive mainstream success is not exclusive to a single queer artist at a time. Whether it’s topping the Billboard Hot 100, charting for the very first time as a solo artist, or even successfully reinventing your sound, 2022 was a year defined by queer artists pushing their limits to discover new avenues toward the promised land of “making it” in the music industry.
But which of these songs managed to stand out from the rest this year? Below, check out Billboard‘s picks for the 25 best songs released by LGBTQ artists in 2022 (listed in alphabetical order).
2022 was good for a lot of things — in the music world, artists like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Bad Bunny and more had blockbuster years worthy of recognition. But when it came to the continued fight for LGBTQ rights, 2022 proved to be more of a backslide. In the United States alone, queer and trans folks spent the year working tirelessly against more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures (including Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming care for young people), threats towards gender diverse kids and their families, a fatal shooting at a gay nightclub, and countless more tragedies and setbacks. Around the world, people struggled to support the biggest sporting event in the world being held in a country where being queer is a crime, while anti-LGBTQ sentiment and hate crimes continued to rise around the world.
Despite the onslaught of negative sentiment and oppressive ideals, queer artists showed up to represent and support their community in 2022. The methods they employed through their albums were often varied — some aimed for sheer escapism, creating new sonic worlds for their fans to luxuriate in; others looked their circumstances dead in the eye, using their music to channel the rage they felt at a world that was seemingly set against them. Either way, LGBTQ artists made their voices heard through some of their best works to date in 2022.
So, which of those albums stood out among the rest? Below, check out Billboard‘s picks for the 20 best albums by LGBTQ artists released in 2022:
This year brought several multi-week No. 1 hits on Billboard’s country charts, along with a surge of new artists earning solid hits with their first singles. Meanwhile, several established artists delved deep into themes of redemption, heartbreak, nostalgia and even revenge.
On this list, Billboard highlights some of country music’s top songs of the past 12 months, from established artists and upstarts alike.
In 1994, Mariah Carey‘s Merry Christmas, which contains her seasonal chart-topping carol “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” helped revitalize the contemporary pop holiday album. The singer’s effort was not the top selling yuletide-themed project of the year — that title went to Kenny G’s Miracles: The Holiday Album — but its enduring popularity helped set a new standard for the modern Christmas album.
By the turn of the century, recording a holiday album became a rite of passage for almost every burgeoning pop star, with some releasing more than one over the course of their careers. Mariah herself released Merry Christmas II You in 2010, while a cappella group Pentatonix dropped six holiday albums in a decade.
At the same time, seasonal music, secular or otherwise, continues to transcend genre and age. Both Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber were just 17 when they released their first holiday collections, The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection and Under the Mistletoe, respectively. And now that well over a decade has passed since both releases, only time will tell if the two have festive fa-la-la follow-ups up their sleeves.
To celebrate “the most wonderful time of the year,” Billboard decided to take a look back and tally up the 21 best Christmas albums of the 21st century so far. Whether you’re curled up by the fireplace with a warm cup of cocoa, taking a drive through winter wonderland or rocking around the Christmas tree with your friends and family, listen in below.
And check out our top 100 Best Christmas Songs of All Time list here.
It was a refrain heard throughout the Billboard offices in the first half of 2022: Where are the hits? The slow start for new entries really impacting the Billboard Hot 100 had us all looking left and looking right for the sort of songs we usually take for granted — the kind that slowly (or not-so-slowly) spread to all corners of the culture, connecting every kind of music fan and becoming unavoidable parts of a given year’s experience. With 2021’s biggest singles refusing to go away and this year’s listenership seemingly too spread out to elect new consensus hits to replace the incumbents, it was starting to look like we might go the whole calendar subsisting on nothing but reruns.
Luckily for us, the hits showed: first from some of pop’s biggest returning heroes, then from some artists taking the next step towards stardom, some longtime hitmakers we hadn’t heard from in a bit, and some new names we hope to be hearing a lot more from in the years to come. And of course, it wasn’t just the big songs that enraptured us in 2022; we found plenty of smaller favorites to save to our streaming playlists and inspire our vinyl orders in between those. But the year just wouldn’t have felt complete without those late-arriving, chart-crashing smashes, particularly since we ended up getting a handful who proved more than worthy of their position.
Here are our 100 favorite songs of 2022, a year that once again proved that no matter the time or context, pop music always finds a way. (Songs were considered eligible for the list if they either came out in 2022, were first released as an official single in 2022, or peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022 — though sorry, Stranger Things heads, we still couldn’t quite justify including “Running Up That Hill” or “Master of Puppets.”)
While every year of the streaming era — maybe every year of the post-Napster era — has brought with it concerns about the health of the full-album format, 2022 ended up making a pretty convincing argument that the LP could still be just as vital in the culture as it was during Tower Records’ heyday. Huge stars came through with enormous albums this past year, dominating discussion, drawing rave reviews, changing careers, and (in at least one or two cases) putting up numbers that previously seemed close to impossible at this point in pop history. (And thanks to a renewed interest in CD packaging and the continued growth of the vinyl market, fans were spending money on actual physical copies of many of these albums, a practice that seemed to be going nearly extinct not that long ago.)
But it wasn’t just the already-big going (and getting) bigger in 2022. Some new and still-rising artists found their voices in unexpected and thrilling ways, scoring breakout hits and connecting with new audiences. Some veteran artists continued to hone their trademark craft, making satisfying and well-received comebacks that made us wish they hadn’t left us for so long beforehand. And some of our preeminent hitmakers continued to evolve and challenge audiences with unexpected shifts in their sound and vision, resulting in returns that were less commercially explosive but even more artistically rewarding.
Here are our 50 favorite albums from this year — sets which both made us nostalgic for the format’s past, and excited about its future.
In October, it was revealed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk took control of Twitter after a lengthy legal battle and months of uncertainty.
Since beginning his reign on the popular social media platform, the multi-billionaire has made a number of controversial decisions, including reinstating former president Donald Trump to Twitter after the site’s previous owners had permanently suspended him for violating company rules in the wake of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The decision to reactivate Trump’s account comes after Musk posted a Twitter poll asking users if they would like to see the former president back on the platform — days after Trump announced his third White House bid. After that, Musk announced that he would return the suspended Trump account after around 15 million users allegedly voted 51.8% in favor of reinstating it.
Amid Musk’s Twitter takeover, a number of stars have removed themselves from the platform, citing hate speech and Musk’s decisions. We’ve compiled all the musicians who have decided that Twitter is no longer for them, including Nine Inch Nails‘ Trent Reznor, Sara Bareilles, Jack White and more. See below.
What is a jock jam?
Well, in the ’90s it was whatever ESPN defined it as for the purposes of their series of Jock Jams compilations: Most often, hip-hop-flavored dance-pop bangers which implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) promoted physical movement of any and all kinds. But defined more broadly for our purposes at Billboard, a Jock Jam is a song that has come to define the in-game experience at a pro sports arena: Any song that, after years of stadium (over-)usage, is as familiar to sports fans’ ears as sneaker squeaks, referee whistles and Zamboni organ groans. It’s a canon that spans rock, hip-hop, dance and country, and still includes pop songs old and new.
To celebrate this canon, Billboard presents our list of the 100 greatest jock jams of all time. We tried to stay away from jams that only really made sense for one sport (like John Fogerty’s “Centerfield”) or one city (like Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up to Boston”), in favor of the classics that could work in the most games in the most places. These are the songs that helped define sports culture in this country for decades, which may have fallen in and out of favor with music supervisors as hip songs of the moment, but which will forever produce a Pavlovian response of sports-readiness. It’s a Hall of Fame in which AC/DC are The Beatles, 2 Unlimited are Michael Jackson, and The Baha Men… well, they’re still The Baha Men, but forever bronzed at their 2000 peak.
Now, a bunch of us here at Billboard are sports junkies, but we didn’t trust our own experiences and recollections in this matter to be anywhere near complete. So to help flesh out our Top 100 and determine the absolute cream of the bumper-music crop, we consulted the experts: Stadium entertainment officials, DJs, and general music men and women of the MLB, NHL, NFL and especially the NBA worlds. They were kind enough to give us their picks for the stadium-anthem GOATs, and explanations for their selections are interspersed throughout our list.
And now, let’s sound the horn and get our countdown underway. Y’all ready for this?