Baby, I don't need dollar bills to have fun tonight

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

2015 : Cheap Thrills - Sia

This is one I don't recognise from the title, but I'm pretty certain I'll know it when I hear it - I don't mind a bit of Sia, particularly because she plays the game her way.

Ah yes, it's the "come on, come on - turn the radio on" song - and pretty catchy it is too. And you actually get two for the price of one here as well - you can either pick the original version which has a very Sia-esque video of some quite clever contemporary dance moves (including wigs, of course) or you can have the remix featuring Sean Paul, which has a video based around a 60s dance competition - also featuring contemporary dance moves and wigs.

Wikipedia tells us the song was written by Sia and Greg Kurstin (probably best known for his work with Adele on 25 and 30) - originally it was planned for Rihanna (who I feel would have done a good job with it) but it ended up with Sia instead. The critics were nice enough about it with The Guardian going overboard for it calling it "a perfectly serviceable party tune" whereas NME praised it as "another superior slab of on-trend ear candy from one of pop's finest songwriters" (which is a very NME turn of phrase). Commercially, it's fair to say it did pretty well - I'm not even going to bother trying to count the number of countries it got to #1 in (let alone list them) but they include Canada, France, Italy and the US, although somewhat surprisingly it didn't get to the top in Australia (#6) or the UK (#2). It got some crazy numbers on sales and streaming though - nine million units in the US, three millions units in the UK and over two BILLION streams on Spotify.

Wikipedia doesn't give us any cover versions - and something else it doesn't tell us is "who is that on the album cover?" - fortunately Reddit came to my rescue and told me it's her ex-husband's father. Back to cover versions, secondhandsongs.com gives us more options than I was expecting, but the only artist I recognised was The Bellas from Pitch Perfect 3 (very inessential) and YouTube doesn't do any better, offering various people I've never heard of doing stripped-back versions of it. Except from our old friend Leo Moracchioli, who does a pretty decent metal version of it.

But yet, where does it come on the year-end chart? Go on - guess! Yup, that's right - absolutely nowhere. It only really sneaks into '15 on a technicality - it was originally released on 17 December, but the version with Sean Paul which really kicked things off didn't come out until 11 February '16. So the best selling track of the year was Mark Ronson and Bruno Marrs' "Uptown Funk" - which really was everywhere that year (and is a very well done track). 

The rest of the top five were OMI's "Cheerleader" (my daughters played that on repeat), Hozier's "Take Me To Church", Ellie Goulding's "Love Me Like You Do" and Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" (another Reed daughter favourite) - which is actually quite a decent selection. And that continues for the rest of the top ten with Adele's "Hello", Major Lazer's "Lean On" (which I don't remember, but let's assume it's decent), James Bay's "Hold Back The River" and finishing up with, surprisingly, not one but two decent Bieber tracks - "What Do You Mean" and "Sorry". The rest of the top forty isn't quite so impressive but I don't mind Years & Years' "King" (#11), Walk The Moon's "Shut Up And Dance" (#19), The Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face" (#21) and, amazingly, Bieber's "Love Yourself" (#24).

Looking further down the chart throughout the year, we have Clean Bandit's "Stronger", Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood", Tinie Tempah's "Not Letting Go", Little Mix's "Black Magic" and Sam Smith's "Writing's On The Wall" - none of which I love, but they're the only ones I recognise. Looking across the pond, Mark Ronson was also top of the pile over there and the rest of the chart was also very similar with the only difference being that they had a lot of tracks from '14 in there.

All in all, it's a pretty decent year. although it feels weird how the track that took the year didn't really feature until the following year - but boy did it kick off big time when it got going! I actually can't say which track I like best out of the year (and not just because it actually might be a Bieber track) but I'm happy enough to give it to Sia - it's a very catchy number.

2014 - A well constructed bunch of not very much
2016 - Decent enough