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Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: History and Key Facts

"The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" is a recurring song ranking compiled by the American magazine Rolling Stone.

By the Pop Culture Files editorial team••2 min read•✓ Fact-checked
Cover to Rolling Stone issue 963, "500 Greatest Songs of All Time"
Rolling Stone · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

"The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" is a recurring song ranking compiled by the American magazine Rolling Stone. It is based on weighted votes from selected musicians, critics, and industry figures. The first list was published in December 2004 in a special issue of the magazine, issue number 963, a year after the magazine published its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2010, Rolling Stone published a revised edition, drawing on the original and a later survey of songs released up until the early 2000s.

Another updated edition of the list was published in 2021, with more than half the entries not having appeared on either of the two previous editions; it was based on a new survey and did not factor in the surveys conducted for the previous lists. The 2021 list was based on a poll of more than 250 artists, musicians, producers, critics, journalists, and industry figures. They each sent in a ranked list of their top 50 songs, and Rolling Stone tabulated the results. In 2024, a revised version of the list was published, with the addition of songs from the 2020s.

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Text excerpted from Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.

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