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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in music and culture, and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag and chart authority. This week it’s 2012, the year the internet train revved its engines, tooted its horn and started chugging out of the station, and for the first time in decades, the old Establishment—labels, radio, media—had serious competition for control of pop culture’s knobs and levers.

After ten years of revenue free-fall from illegal mp3 downloading, influence was just about all the music biz had left, and now even that was slipping away—into a new reality where one viral clip, one lucky meme, a reality show moment, a TV sync, commercial placement, a bedroom Producer with a SoundCloud account, could outpace the most expensive major-label launch.

It’s what tech visionaries had been saying the internet could be for decades. Now it was here—thrilling and unpredictable for fans and a lifeline for indie artists, but for the industry? Kinda like standing on that platform without a ticket watching the train pull out. “What now?”

And it wasn’t like the business hadn’t seen warning signs. For a decade, every step forward into the digital future felt more like a stumble. Sales and revenue circling the drain thanks to filesharing. Major albums leaking online—Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP in 2000, 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in ’03, Kanye West’s Graduation in ’07—tanking marketing plans and launch schedules. But now the internet was coming for A&R—Artists and Repertoire—the suits at the label whose job is to find and develop the next stars.

Soulja Boy’s “Crank That,” a weird outlier when it topped the Hot100 in 2007, suddenly looked more like a preview: a viral one-man phenom breaking through without a major-label machine behind it. And it kept happening. Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say” in ’09; “TiK ToK” (not the app, the Ke$ha song): the #1 hit of 2010; Far East Movement’s “Like a G6“—a totally independent L.A. crew. Underground Mixtape Rapper B.o.B’s “Nothin’ on You,” the hit that introduced Bruno Mars via his feature singing the hook.

And speaking of Mixtape Rap, 2011 was the year The Weeknd became an obsession on edgy Blogs like Pitchfork, The Fader and Complex before labels came a-courtin’. And there were hits that definitely wouldn’t have happened without internet buzz: Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci” and Tyler, the Creator’s “Yonkers.”

So what was Billboard‘s response to all this? Well, as one streaming exec later put it to Rolling Stone, the debate in the charts department over what to measure boiled down to “Do people spend money on it…or do people spend time with it?” In just the first three months of 2012, plays on streaming platforms exploded 65% to nearly half a billion, which all but settled the question. So in March, Billboard launched its first streaming chart, “On Demand Songs,” and even more importantly, started factoring that data into the Hot100 for the first time. Then in 2013, they added YouTube views.

Over the next few years streaming would subsume every other distribution channel, even—finally!—illegal downloads, black market mixtapes and music sharing blogs, none of which Billboard had ever factored into its charts. So starting in 2012, for the first time in the 21st century, the entire music ecosystem began coming back out of the shadows and into the light of Billboard‘s rankings. Five of the ten hits in our 2012 Chartcrush countdown: by Artists who’d never made the charts before 2012. No wonder Billboard declared 2012, in a cover story in the year-in-music issue, “The Year of the Newcomer.”

#10 Ellie Goulding – Lights

And one of the newcomers in our countdown: our Act at #10, with a song that took 52 weeks to reach its peak of #2 breaking the record for slowest climb into the top five previously shared by Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody” in ’09 and “The Macarena.” It was the title track of her debut album—in 2010; the title track, but oddly only a bonus cut, and only in the U.K. and Germany, and only on iTunes. No wonder it took two years to find its audience! And the song, ironically, inspired by her fear of the dark when she was a kid, it’s Ellie Goulding’s slo-mo breakthrough, “Lights.”

Ellie Goulding, “Lights” at #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits. Along with Lana Del Rey’s smoky, cinematic debut album Born to Die and its top10 hit “Summertime Sadness,” it primed the charts for a surge of chill, atmospheric Female Singers soundtracking the rise of mindfulness culture, yoga, and “wellness” aesthetics in the early ’10s: Lorde, Banks, Halsey, Tove Lo, CHVRCHES.

Goulding herself cracked the top 20 again in 2013 with “Burn,” then hit #3 in 2015 with the Fifty Shades of Grey Ballad “Love Me like You Do,” but was derailed by tabloid gossip and fan-fueled drama. Ed Sheeran in his first U.S. top10 in 2014, “Don’t,” all but confirmed rumors that she’d cheated on him with OneDirection’s Niall Horan, and the backlash sent her into seclusion for five years—the darker side of fame in an era of weaponized fandom and social media megaphones.

#9 Kelly Clarkson – Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)

Next up at #9, the closest thing to a veteran in our countdown. Her debut single, #1 all the way back in 2002 after she won the first season of American Idol. And by the end of the decade, she was Pop-Rock royalty thanks to her blockbuster album Breakaway, which put three hits in the top 20 on the year in ’05—two of those in the top ten.

But then, just as the Electropop wave was cresting, she doubled down on Rock. Another #1 in ’09, but then a slump in 2010 and ’11, until this—an Empowerment Anthem originally intended for, but passed on by, Beyoncé. At #9, the title track from her fifth album, it’s Kelly Clarkson with “Stronger.”

“Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” Kelly Clarkson at #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits: #1 for three weeks early in the year and the best-selling single of her career.

Timing, of course, is everything, and “Stronger” hit just after Katy Perry’s “Firework,” P!nk’s “Raise Your Glass” and Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” had all cycled out, becoming 2012’s surprise Pride anthem. That same year, President Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage, so Kelly was tapped to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at his second inauguration, which she did live, and Beyoncé caught a bunch of flak the next day for lip-syncing the National Anthem.

Kelly never made it back to #1, but just as Electropop was nearing the end of its arc, she finally leaned in and scored one last top10 with the title track of her album Piece by Piece in 2015. And in the late ’10s as she turned to children’s books, judging The Voice and hosting her own daytime talk show on ABC, she managed something few others have: a contemporary Christmas classic! “Underneath the Tree,” one of only a few holiday songs recorded since the 1960s that’s returned to the top 20 every year in the streaming era.

#8 Maroon 5 – Payphone

So Kelly Clarkson might be the closest thing to a veteran in our countdown, but only by a year and a half. In 2004, our Act at #8 roared in with a one-two punch chart debut—two top5s that both made our top ten on the year: “This Love” and “She Will Be Loved.” And like Kelly, they slumped during peak EDM, but cracked the code again in 2011 with the Christina Aguilera collab “Moves like Jagger.”

And then in 2012 they became only the second Act since The Beatles to notch more than one song in a year-end top ten two separate years (Usher was the first since The Beatles). And speaking of judges on NBC’s American Idol knock-off The Voice, the Group’s Frontman Adam Levine? A fixture since the show’s debut in 2011. At #8, the first of two hits in our countdown by Maroon 5, “Payphone.”

Payphones had all but vanished by 2012, but Maroon 5 still wrote a song about one, and scored a massive hit! That was the Radio Version we just heard at #8 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits—the Wiz Khalifa Rap verse on the album version, replaced with a new bridge sung by Adam Levine, who also re-recorded parts of his own vocal to clean up the language. A lot of effort for a Radio Edit, but it paid off: six weeks at #2 on the Hot 100, and nine at #2 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

Rap, meanwhile, in a rough patch on the Hot100. Between Khalifa’s breakout “Black and Yellow” in early 2011 and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” in early ’13, the only Rap song to hit #1 was Flo Rida’s “Whistle” in the Summer of 2012, and he mostly sings on that. And whistles! Possibly related: 2012 was, according to Newsweek, the only year since 2001 with no #1s that required a Parental Advisory label for explicit lyrics!

#7 fun. – Some Nights

At #7 we have the second of the two Acts with two hits in our 2012 top ten countdown: a Trio out of New York whose breakthrough earlier in the year didn’t just break the rules; it torched the rulebook, and radio ate it up.

“Quirky sounds stand out and can go viral quickly,” one Programmer told Billboard. And once songs that “just break all the rules” become hits, another said, “the door is open for more new sounds.” Viral breakthroughs jumping from social to mainstream media—”a signal story of 2012,” Billboard declared.

Well, before all was said and done, the Trio’s second single was also a hit, creeping up the chart while that breakthrough was riding high: 24 weeks to crack the top ten, then 19 in the top ten. At #7, it’s the title track from fun.’s second album, “Some Nights.”

Fun.’s second hit of the year, “Some Nights” at #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2012. The Guardian compared it to Queen, and well, yeah. The British Band Muse, already known for—as Entertainment Weekly put it—”Queen-isms:” they also pulled out all the stops on their 2012 album, The 2nd Law.

But not only that, it was a big year for the real deal: a Queen-themed American Idol episode and selling out stadiums in Europe touring with ’09 Idol finalist Adam Lambert standing in for deceased Frontman Freddie Mercury. But fun. wasn’t just riding a wave, they started one with that breakthrough hit I mentioned that dimmed EDM-Pop’s glowstick crown in the Spring. Hang tight, that game-changer, still to come.

#6 LMFAO – Sexy and I Know It

But first at #6, the song that if you were reading the tea leaves in late 2011 into 2012 with a certain—I dunno, jaded pop culture prescience?—might’ve tipped you off that something new was right around the corner: that the decadent day-glo EDM-Pop that’d dominated since Black Eyed Peas and Gaga in ’09 was starting to wear thin.

Once a big Pop trend hits its saturation point and descends into self-parody, it’s usually at or near the end of its arc, right? Well, Disco had the Village People; New Wave had Frankie Goes to Hollywood; Bling Rap had “Laffy Taffy.” And EDM-Pop had these guys, with back-to-back hits that kept them in the top ten continuously from June 2011 to March 2012.

The first, “Party Rock Anthem,” was 2011’s Summer Banger. And then this even more cartoonish follow-up surged in the Fall, hitting #1 the first week of 2012 thanks to a wave of downloads by kiddos who got iTunes gift cards in their Christmas stockings, speculated one columnist in The Village Voice. It’s a cheeky, bass-heavy anthem to bulletproof self-confidence that was both ridiculous and ridiculously catchy. At #6, LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It.”

LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” at #6—the video featuring Redfoo and SkyBlu thrusting their pelvises in neon Speedos, banned from daytime rotations on some networks. Of course, EDM-Pop didn’t flame out quite as spectacularly as Disco in ’79 after Disco Demolition Night—one of the genre’s crown jewels is still to come on our Chartcrush countdown of 2012’s top ten hits. But LMFAO did. They split only months after “Sexy and I Know It” topped the charts, as Stereogum’s Tom Breihan wrote, “at the exact moment that the public would’ve gotten sick of them anyway.”

#5 fun. – We Are Young

And right on cue, a very different kind of song was climbing the Hot100. First dropped in September 2011, it flopped—’til the cast of Fox’s Glee did it in an episode that aired in December and the Glee Cast version debuted at #12.

Glee charted 208 songs on the Hot100 from ’09 to ’13—80% of them for just one week. No radio airplay—all paid downloads.

And the original charted the same week, but got an even bigger boost from a Chevy Superbowl commercial, and radio pounced. By mid-March it was #1, where it stayed for six weeks—the first #1 Alternative crossover since Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” in 2008—four years. At #5, the Anthem that swapped bass drops for big feelings on the charts. We heard the follow-up “Some Nights” at #7; here again, fun., their breakthrough featuring Singer Janelle Monáe, brought in by Producer Jeff Bhasker: “We Are Young.”

To hear fun. Frontman Nate Ruess tell it, he nearly handed the “We Are Young” beat over to Kanye West and Jay-Z to rap over on their Watch the Throne collab album, but he reconsidered, and scored the year’s #5 hit—plus Song of the Year and Best New Artist at the Grammys.

fun. did start working on a new album, but the project fizzled and some songs ended up on Ruess’ solo record in 2015. But Ruess’ biggest post-fun. moment? His Duet with P!nk on “Just Give Me a Reason” in 2013. Guitarist Jack Antonoff, however, went on to Max Martin/Dr. Luke levels of success as a Producer. Among his credits: #1s by Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter.

#4 Maroon 5 – One More Night

At #4, the second hit by the other Act with two songs in our 2012 Chartcrush Top Ten—and second on the calendar, too, but pushed to radio a little too soon, just as that first hit—”Payphone” we heard back at #8 was starting its five-week run at #1. So after debuting at #42, it dropped to #86. But once “Payphone” began to fade, radio came around and by mid-August it was Billboard‘s top Airplay Gainer—top ten two weeks later, then nine weeks at #1. At #4, how about a little Reggae? Maroon 5’s “One More Night.”

After Maroon 5’s 2010 album Hands All Over flopped, Frontman Adam Levine made some key moves. He joined The Voice and enlisted Benny Blanco and Shellback to produce a bonus cut for the album’s Deluxe Edition release, and “Moves like Jagger,” his Duet with fellow Voice coach Christina Aguilera was Maroon 5’s first #1 in four years.

At the same time, he featured on another Benny Blanco production, Gym Class Heroes’ “Stereo Hearts” and for 14 weeks in the Fall of 2011 while both were in the top ten, you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing Adam Levine. But after that, Maroon 5’s hits were Maroon 5 in name only. Levine teamed with Blanco and Shellback again on “Payphone.” And “One More Night” we just heard at #4? Shellback and his mentor, the Grand Poohbah of Pop Producers, none other than Max Martin.

And seven of the nine weeks it was #1 in the Fall of 2012, the top two was a cage match: studio-crafted, radio-supported Pop perfection vs. the leftfield internet chaos of Psy’s juggernaut “Gangnam Style,” which couldn’t knock “One More Night” out of the top spot—but only because the Hot100 wasn’t yet factoring YouTube views. The week Billboard made that change in February of 2013, viral chaos debuted at #1 in the form of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.”

#3 Rihanna – We Found Love

And speaking of hits that blocked other hits from #1, at #3 on our Chartcrush 2012 Top Ten Countdown, the one that ensured that LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” only got two weeks on top instead of ten, late 2011 into ’12.

LMFAO may’ve felt like EDM-Pop’s shark jump, but this? Rolling Stone called it “EDM’s Definitive Anthem.” But not only that—many consider it the Singer’s finest moment and when you add it all up, she’s the top-charting Hot100 Act of the entire EDM-Pop Era, ’06 to 2014. At #3 it’s Rihanna, her 11th #1 since ’06, featuring Rave DJ Calvin Harris: their club-certified guaranteed dancefloor filler, “We Found Love.”

Rihanna was everywhere in 2010 and ’11: three #1s on her 2010 album Loud, plus featured hooks on other artists’ hits. Meanwhile, Calvin Harris opened for her on the European leg of her tour—the breakout EDM Festival Star whose album 18 Months notched a record eight U.K. top10s.

But “We Found Love,” which he pitched to Rihanna during the tour, was his first U.S. hit, and American radio spent 2012 catching up: two more Calvin Harris top 20s by the end of the year, two more in ’13, then his #7 hit “Summer” in 2014.

Fast-forward to 2023, after Rihanna did the Superbowl halftime show, “We Found Love” re-entered the Hot100 for a week, along with two of her other past hits. Definitive EDM anthem, indeed!

#2 Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe

But now we’re down to #2, and the top two hits of 2012? Like fun.’s “We Are Young” at #5: viral, homemade, unlikely—redefining fame for the 2010s, because in 2012, the internet stopped being a sideshow and became Pop’s main stage. And get this: all three of those viral hits were back-to-back-to-back at #1—an entire, uninterrupted Summer of leftfield chart toppers.

“We Are Young” kicked it off in March and April; our #1 song, May into June. And at #2, the third—on top late June all the way to mid-August—by a semifinalist on the 2007 season of Canadian Idol, who’d scored a couple minor hits up North, but not a ripple in the States ’til fellow Canadian Justin Bieber home for the holidays heard her new single on Toronto radio and tweeted that it was “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard.”

A few weeks later he posted a video lip-syncing and dancing to it with Selena Gomez and friends, and it debuted at #38 just a week before “We Are Young” hit #1. From there it rose steadily as other lip-sync vids appeared: Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, troops in Afghanistan. Colin Powell and Gayle King sang it on CBS This Morning, and someone cobbled together Obama soundbites to match the lyrics. So of course it hit #1 for nine weeks and was Billboard‘s “Song of the Summer.” At #2 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits, it’s Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”

Carly Rae Jepsen’s label miscalculated, loading up her rushed 2012 album with A-list Producers and killing any chance of anything on it matching the offbeat charm of “Call Me Maybe.” After one follow-up hit in the Fall—”Good Times” with Owl City—she didn’t crack the top 10 again.

Interestingly, though, “Call Me Maybe” is the only song in our countdown that rated even a mention, let alone a ranking, in Pitchfork‘s “Top 100 Tracks of 2012.” Pitchfork, the early ’10s go-to for “serious” music criticism. But amid the “monolithic Euroclub stomp” of 2012, Writer Amy Phillips wrote, “Call Me Maybe” was a throwback, to the era before the internet “shattered the idea of the all-consuming Song of the Summer into a million little niches.”

Plus, the internet picking the hits was an existential threat to any and all would-be cultural gatekeepers (including Pitchfork), so maybe they were just hedging their bets! But Carly Rae Jepsen despite no hit singles post-2012 kept selling albums and tickets into the ’20s as the Critic-anointed, Hipster-approved Avatar of Pure Pop.

#1 Gotye featuring Kimbra – Somebody That I Used to Know

Not so the Act at #1 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2012, though. By design. After this one world-conquering hit, he never released anything under his name again. He’d been crafting sample-based tracks for a decade in Australia and his album in ’06 had Critics comparing him to Peter Gabriel, but this one topped the charts in Australia for eight weeks in 2011, and went super-viral thanks to its artsy video, shared far and wide on social media, especially Facebook.

Built off a sample of the first measure of a track from a 1967 album he found in a thrift shop—Brazilian Guitarist Luiz Bonfá’s “Seville“—and it was back in the top ten in 2025, liberally sampled on Doechii’s “Anxiety“—here’s the #1 song of 2012, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.”

The #1 song of 2012 and Record of the Year at the Grammys, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The Female Singer with the Woman’s perspective in the last verse? New Zealander Kimbra—tapped to sing it after a more famous Singer canceled last-minute. Who? Gotye won’t say, but he did say he ran into her months later and she admitted, yeah, “maybe that was a mistake.”

It topped the chart for eight weeks after dislodging fun.’s “We Are Young” the last week in April, and then stayed in the top five through most of Carly Rae Jepsen’s reign—as I mentioned, a whole Summer of viral #1s as other internet-fueled stories hijacked the news cycle, like the YouTube documentary Kony 2012 about a Ugandan warlord; plus Alt-R&B Pioneer Frank Ocean coming out as bi; GOP Candidate Mitt Romney’s “Binders full of women;” Honey Boo Boo; “slacktivism.”

And the kicker? Obama Officials Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice blaming the deadly Al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on a random YouTube vid—and the media and public mostly buying it, because after a year of viral media taking over the culture, why wouldn’t they?

Bonus

Okay, so that’s our top ten here on our 2012 edition of Chartcrush. But three of the hits we heard this hour, not among Billboard‘s top ten for the year. Maroon 5’s “One More Night” and fun.’s “Some Nights” were too late in the year to have their full chart runs counted towards 2012 in Billboard, so they’ve got those at numbers 18 and 14 respectively. And LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It”—that was split between 2011 and 2012, so Billboard‘s got it at #13.

At Chartcrush we count every song’s full chart run regardless of when during the year it was a hit—no splitting. And we rank it in whichever calendar year it saw the majority of its chart action. But those three hits coming in to our 2012 top ten nudges three out from Billboard‘s, so in our bonus segment we’re gonna take a look at those.

#16 One Direction – What Makes You Beautiful

First up, Billboard‘s #10 song was #16 on our Chartcrush 2012 ranking—the first Boy Band to make it big in America since Backstreet Boys and ‘NSYNC at the turn of the century, their first two albums Up All Night and Take Me Home both topping the album chart, and they had two top tens in 2012. The first, in the Spring? “What Makes You Beautiful.” It’s One Direction.

Millennials had Backstreet Boys and ‘NSYNC and Gen-Z had a British Boy Band—One Direction: Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. They charted nearly 30 hits in the early ’10s—”What Makes You Beautiful” was the first, peaking at #4 for two weeks in the Spring—then dozens more as Solo Acts after the split in 2015.

#12 Nicki Minaj – Starships

Well, we’re looking at the hits that made the top ten on Billboard‘s 2012 year-end Hot100 but not our Chartcrush Top Ten we counted down earlier, and their #9 song is the early ’10s top charting Female Rapper with her fifth top10, including features. But it’s only her second as a Headliner, after “Super Bass” in 2011—Nicki Minaj, “Starships.”

“Starships” only got as high as #5 during its 31 weeks on the Hot100, but 15 of them were the top ten, March to July during that run of viral hits at #1. Billboard‘s #9 song of 2012; #12 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#13 The Wanted – Glad You Came

And finally, Billboard‘s #6 song. We’ve got it at #13—the other British Boy Band that made waves in 2012. OneDirection’s “What Makes You Beautiful” peaked at #4; well, these guys got to #3, propelled—like fun.’s “We Are Young”—by a Glee Cast cover that aired in February (no Superbowl commercial though!). It’s The Wanted with “Glad You Came.”

British-Irish Boy Band The Wanted, “Glad You Came.” Combined, One Direction and members Zayn Malik, Harry Styles and Liam Payne notched ten top10s in the ’10s decade, but The Wanted, despite beating 1D into the top ten by five weeks in the Spring of 2012 and getting their own E! network reality show, The Wanted Life, had just that one.

And that’s all we have for you here on our 2012 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard this hour, head over to our website, chartcrush.com, for a transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version, plus wack extras like our full top100 chart and interactive line graph of the Billboard chart runs for the top10 hits. Which we do that for every year, 1940s to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Meanwhile, thanks for listening, and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year and another edition of Chartcrush.

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