The uptempo revival that started to warm up on top 40 at the end of 2019 broke into a full-on sprint in early 2020, resulting in some of the best synth-pop and disco-based hits we’ve heard on the FM dial in ages. (And if you thought TikTok was influential before, that of course proved to be a gentle nudge compared to the full-body impact it flexed once the youth of America had less reason than ever not to spend all day on their phones.)īut even if 2020 proved to be a very strange place for pop music, it was also an undeniably fruitful one. 1s over the space of the year’s final nine months. (And then imagine trying to explain how a new video-sharing service called TikTok helped make it all happen.)Īnd oh yeah, there was that whole global shutdown thing that happened two and a half months into the year - which gave Taylor the time and space to record and release Folklore less than a year after her last LP, which made radio rally around the same handful of comfort-food pop hits to an unprecedented level, and which made the top of the Hot 100 chaotic enough that we had 20 different No. 1 of that month, and the No.1 bow for a previously unknown New Zealand teenager named Jawsh 365 - all on the same song. Imagine trying to explain to folks in 2015 that a half-decade later, we’d get Jason Derulo’s first No.

Taylor Swift had the biggest album of the period with a surprise indie-folk LP, radio records were broken by The Weeknd (sure) and 24kGoldn and iann dior (more surprising), and Nicki Minaj finally scored the first Hot 100 chart-topper of her decade-plus of superstardom - only to score a second barely a month later.

Well, it certainly was an unusual year for pop music, wasn’t it?

Love song bar loch and key mar 12