My Top 100 Popular Japanese Songs From the 2010s

Throughout the past few years of being into J-Pop and anime songs, I’ve found myself looking at what’s popular in Japan on charts like Spotify and iTunes for recommendations, so my pallet of J-Pop/J-Rock is a bit rooted in the mainstream, but I got curious as to how much popular stuff I really like, so I made it a goal to go through different decades of J-Pop’s history by selecting the biggest hits of each year and ranking them, starting with the 2010s as it would get me started with pretty familiar ground. I tried to select at most less than 20 songs per year, but closer to 13-15 songs narrowed down by BillionHits/Billboard rankings, RIAJ status, YouTube views and Spotify streams. So how was it? Well to be honest there was very few outright bad songs imo, but there was a good portion of songs I was pretty indifferent towards. That being said, very few of those made the top 100 and many of my favorite artists and bands also had songs within this decade, so that’s always fun to see. On top of that, there were some really nice surprises. I will always be more biased towards the 2016-2019 years cuz many of my favorites started to find their footing within these years, but 2012 was surprisingly stacked imo. As of writing the description for this video, I already have the 2000s list ready as well, so I just need to edit that and I’ll try to have it up soon. I will say though while editing this list, I realized there were a few songs that weren’t as big as I thought (Yoru no Odoriko, Zutto, For You, EXCITE, Hello world, Nemurihime, and Memeshikute) so I’ll try to make sure everything in the 2000s list is pretty big. Also I used the iTunes romanization for a lot of the songs so if any of the songs spellings seem weird, that’s why. I tend to use those in case someone finds a song they like and thus they can just type the exact title on Apple Music or Spotify and have it pop up. People might also be wondering what BillionHits is: basically from the years past 2005, digital music started to become more mainstream in Japan of a way for people to listen to music, so Oricon physical CDs weren’t necessarily the best indicator of popularity like they used to be, so the BillionHits blog created a chart (combining RIAJ digital certifications and Oricon sales) to better depict the popularity of songs from 2006-2009. From 2010-2016 they do this, but only counting digital certifications because idol groups started to flood the market with multiple versions of CDs, so Oricon charts were practically useless. From 2017 onwards, Billboard Year End charts started to become a pretty good indicator of what people were listening to the most in those years. https://billion-hits.hatenablog.com