Best of 2009: A Hot 100 Redux

• DOWNLOAD | KERI HILSON “Turnin’ Me On” (feat. Lil Wayne) In a Perfect World…, 2009

There were 429 new entries on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart in 2009. I know this because Michelangelo Matos did all the work and posted the spreadsheet to his Facebook page. This is, as you can imagine, a good place to start if you’re trying to talk about pop music this year, so I decided to turn his raw data into something a bit more specific. Mostly, I set out to answer one question: Does my perception of pop cultural trends and the artists that wave those banners correlate with singles sales and radio play? Here’s what I found:

Lil Wayne is so big he doesn’t even need to put out an album. I put Wayne up against every major artist I could think of — including the ubiquitous Taylor Swift — and he still came out on top, recording or appearing on fourteen Hot 100 singles this year. It is also crazy notable that none of these tracks were from 2008’s breakthrough Tha Carter III. Only “Prom Queen,” which charted all the way back in February, is slated to be released on a proper Lil Wayne album. Curiously, that album, Rebirth, has also become this year’s Chinese Democracy.

You can sort of curse on the radio. I figured that the Lonely Island’s “Jizz in My Pants” might get a little leeway from the FCC, but I’m not sure how Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” made it past the program director’s desk.

Emo owns less than three percent of the pop singles market share. When you consider how much money is spent on marketing the new emo bands — and how many tickets a typical Warped Tour will sell each summer — having less than a dozen Top 100 singles split between eight bands seems terribly underwhelming. Even more so when you consider that two of these singles — Cobra Starship’s “Good Girls Go Bad” and Boys Like Girls’ “Two is Better Than One” — were padded with extra vocals by a Gossip Girl and Billboard’s Artist of the Year, respectively.

American Idol still matters. Despite its flagging ratings, nine of its contestants had hit singles this year — for a grand total of 29 Idol-related tracks that I could count. The lion’s share of the work belonged to Carrie Underwood (who really transcended the damn thing), Kris Allen (who became the contest’s most nondescript winner ever), and Adam Lambert (who isn’t having much of a problem becoming a spectacle), but the real winner is clearly 19 Recordings and RCA, who pretty much own these poor kids.

Miley Cyrus is richer than you. At this point in time, there isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t know that Hannah Montana is basically Chris Gaines for the Disney set. Which makes it all the more surreal that Miley Cyrus can get away with releasing ten Top 100 singles this year under two different names, and — as if only to prove that she could — she even had a hit with her washed-up father.

But seriously, America’s biggest hitmaker is a television show inspired by musical theater. Fuck Lil Wayne. With a total of 25 hit singles in 2009, the cast of Glee totally owns your radio. Don’t ever stop believin’.