One More Year-End List: Country's Top 10 for 2014

This time of the year we’re tripping over “End of the Year” lists.

Still, we’re pleased to add one more – A&O&B’s annual “Top Songs of the Year.” Each year we publish for clients the final research-driven rankings of every song we added over the previous 12 months. There were 88 in all in 2014. 

Here are this year’s Top 10 songs:

Rank	Artist	Title
1	Luke Bryan	Drink A Beer
2	Luke Bryan	Play It Again
3	Brantley Gilbert	Bottoms Up
4	Blake Shelton	My Eyes
5	Frankie Ballard	Sunshine and Whiskey
6	Blake Shelton	Doin’ What She Likes
7	Florida-Georgia Line	Dirt
8	Dierks Bentley	Drunk On A Plane
9	Justin Moore	Lettin’ the Night Roll
10	Luke Bryan	Rollercoaster

This is the third consecutive year that Luke Bryan has placed multiple songs in the Top 10 and third time in four years that Blake Shelton has done it. To put that in perspective, the only other artists to have multiple songs in our Top 10 were Brad Paisley who had two in 2011 and the Zac Brown Band who had 3 in 2010.

“Drink A Beer” had the top “Like A Lot” score - a perfect 1.0 (the song’s rank average over the last 8 weeks of its life as a current) and spent 13 weeks as our number one testing song.  In addition to his Top 10 finishing titles, Luke also appeared on the 12^th song of the year as part of Florida-Georgia Line’s “This is How We Roll.”

This made Luke Bryan our Top Artist of the Year.

Blake Shelton, who was last year's Top Aritst, finished number two to Luke. Blake had two songs in the Top 10 this year as well as one more in the 20s. 

This is the second year in a row that Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton had the most titles in the top 1/3 of all songs tested.

Meanwhile, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Florida-Georgia Line, Lady Antebellum and Cole Swindell had good years too with each placing two titles in the Top 30.

Notably absent from among the top test titles were Historical Superstars – major artists that had multiple yearly hits prior to 1997.

Total Positive scores were similar to what we saw last year. However “Favorite/Like A Lot” scores for all songs were softer again this year. Anecdotally, market-to-market, we’re seeing an increasing lack of consensus on the biggest hits each week making local research ever more important.

Here’s an Infographic with more.  Enjoy!

You can also check out our Top 10 lists for 2013 here and 2012 part one here and part two here.

And if you're fascinated by America's fascination with end of the year lists, you'll enjoy this from the Washington Post.