I tried to be chill, but you're so hot that I melted

Continuing my trip up the list of the most streamed songs for each year.  

2008 : I'm Yours - Jason Mraz

I'm aware of Jason Mraz, but only because he's called Jason - I believe he's a purveyor of US R&B nonsense but I'm pretty certain I don't know this song (although it won't surprise me in the slightest if I hear one note and go "oh - it's that one").

No, it's not R&B nonsense, it's slacker-singer-songwriter nonsense - and nonsense I recognise and I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to listen to this more than once. It's insubstantial ukelele-based puffery with an absolutely pointless video - can you guess that I'm not impressed?

Wikipedia basically gives us a pointless scene-by-scene breakdown of the video and tells us exactly how successful the song was. And boy was it successful! It only managed to get to #11 over here, but had a 50 week run in the charts - the longest run ever not to make it to the top ten, apparently. But, funnily enough, it really went great guns in the US - spending 76 weeks in the chart (then a record, since overtaken by Glass Animals' "Heat Waves"), selling over 6 millions copies (and that's sales, not streams). But pretty much everywhere in the world went mad for it - what were people thinking? The only fact that made me smile was that he did a version of it on Sesame Street - but I'd also say it didn't surprise me in the slightest.

Wikipedia doesn't offer up any cover versions but secondhandsongs.com offers up a surprisingly large number but none of them are by anyone I've ever heard of - Judith Alegarbes, The Yale Spizzwinks or Haley Klinkhammer anyone? YouTube comes up trumps though giving us a superyoung One Direction (it's terrible, but at least it's funny) and Herb Alpert (the trumpet actually works quite well).

Right - there's got to be a million way better songs than this in 2008, hasn't there? Looking at the UK year-end chart, the #1 track is Alexandra Burke's "Hallelujah" which is perfectly passable but not relevant for our purposes. Quietly ignoring the X Factor finalists offering at #2 (Mariah Carey's "Hero"), we come to two much better options - Duffy's "Mercy" and Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl", both of which are fine tracks (and I love Katy's offering). I feel I need to complete the top five even though I feel a bit dirty mentioning Nickelback's "Rockstar" - but the top ten actually supplies three more decent offerings in the form of Estelle's "American Boy", Kings Of Leon's "Sex On Fire" and Sam Sparro's "Black And Gold". That's a surprisingly strong top ten for me and we also have Flo-rida's "Low", Dizzee Rascal's "Dance Wiv Me" and Rihanna's "Disturbia" and "Take A Bow" in the top twenty, so there are some decent tracks in the year-end chart for a change.

Looking further down the chart throughout the year we also have Adele's "Chasing Pavements" and The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name", along with a load of tracks that I'm sure are great, but I don't remember them at all. I think this is because whilst I listened to a lot of chart music at this time, I rarely paid any attention to what it was called (whereas now I basically don't listen to singles at all).

So, whilst I'm not impressed with the winner, I'm actually surprisingly happy with the competition - I'd certainly give the year to Katy but tbh I'd be happy with absolutely anything other than Jason.

2007 - A decent enough song, but not an obvious winner
2009 - Cheesy fun!