Well, you only need the light when it's burning low

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

2012 : Let Her Go - Passenger

This is a track I know and quite frankly I'm astounded it's taken the year, which leads me to suspect that I'm very soon going to be astounded as to how successful it was. The video is 4:14 of him on stage or backstage and I reckon it must have taken them, oooh, at least 4:14 to design it - so obviously it's the 27th most watched video on YouTube (amazingly, "Baby Shark" is top with nearly fifteen billion views, more than six billion than "Despacito" in second place).

Wikipedia starts off by surprising me - Passenger is British! How did I not know this? He's also recorded fourteen albums - this came off his fourth, All The Little Lights, which is somewhat unsurprisingly his best selling album (but somewhat surprisingly not his highest charting which is his 2016 offering Young As The Morning, Old As The Sea which got to #1). After that, it manages to convey an impressively tiny amount of information - apparently "the lyrics of the song are poetic and melancholic, describing the regrets associated with ending a relationship". Who knew, eh? 

Its success all started when Dave, a Dutch fan, emailed Passenger and said "I reckon this would go down well over here" - and it turns out Dave was pretty damn right. It got to #1 there late in '12 and then took over the world in '13, getting to #1 in a gazillion countries. It only got to #2 in the UK and #5 in the US - but it still SOLD a million copies here and a mere four million over there. Wikipedia offers up some cover versions from Birdy (I actually prefer this - it's spine-tingling), Glen Templeton (a slight country twang, but otherwise completely inessential) and JES (this is bad in a DJ Sammy style). secondhandsongs.com offers up quite a few options but I've never heard of any of the artists - and the same is very much the case for YouTube because EVERYONE wants to give this a go it appears (it doesn't sound the trickiest to play on the old gee-tar).

Yeah, I guess it was pretty successful, wasn't it? But we know it's not going to be the best selling track of the year in the UK though because it didn't take off until 2013 - it peaked in May on its fifth week of a 56 week run. The best selling track was Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know" (which is a far more interesting track than this) and the rest of the top five were Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" (possibly my favourite cheesy track ever!), Fun's "We Are Young" (which I don't remember), David Guetta's "Titanium" and James Arthur's "Impossible" - I like the four I know at least, but things go badly downhill at #6 though with Psy's "Gangnam Style". After that, I know remarkably few of the tracks - Rihanna's "Diamonds" (#11), Adele's "Skyfall" (#20), Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and Olly Murs's "Troublemaker" (#29) are the only ones I recognise by name, although I suspect I'd hum along to some of the others if I heard them.

Looking further down the chart throughout the year, the only ones I recognise and like are Tinchy Stryder's "Bright Lights", John Legend's "Ordinary People", Elbow's "One Day Like This" and Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble" - not a huge selection, to say the least. Looking over the pond, the top three tracks are all the same as here and the rest of the chart is either tracks I saw in our chart but didn't recognise or tracks I haven't seen yet but still don't recognise.

So, considering the year end charts, it's a bit of a surprise that either Gotye or Carly didn't take the year but I guess Passenger has just built up the streams from mopey, lovelorn people over the years - it's a perfectly fine song, but nothing better than that. And it obviously goes without saying that Elbow's "One Day Like This" is clearly the best track of the year - but since when did quality count for anything?

2011 - A reasonably well known track