The Times They Are A-Changin': An Analysis of Rolling Stone Magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

Abstract

In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine published its first list of the “500 Greatest Songs” of all time.  Their list was recently revised in 2021.  Over half of the song titles in the first list were displaced by hit songs released since 2004 or by hit songs released before 2004 that found new popularity among the magazine’s 2021 survey respondents.  The authors examine how well hit songs released (i) before 1970, (ii) during the 1970s, (iii) the 1980s, and (iv) the 1990s hold up in the rankings between the two lists.  Chi-square tests on contingency tables show that despite the smaller number of hits released before 2000 in the 2021 list, the decade of the song’s release is unrelated to ranking.  That is, hit songs released in the 1970s are no less popular (as a percentage of all 500 hit songs in the “Top 100”) in 2021 than they were in 2004.