I was so disappointed in the 2011 new music crop that I didn’t do any ranking of the year’s best songs at all, but 2012 was so fertile that I planned to do a top 20 that became a top 40. One way in which my list differs from many others you’ll find, besides the fact that it’s one person’s opinion rather than a staff’s collective thoughts, is that I’ve got several artists represented more than once. If an artist was good enough to produce one of the five or ten best songs of the year, there’s a decent chance the same artist produced another pretty good track along the way too, right?<\/p>\n
Each song title is followed by links to purchase the song from amazon and from iTunes as well as a link to a video on Youtube, using the official video wherever possible. And I’ll apologize in advance for overlooking \u201cGangnam Style.\u201d <\/p>\n
UPDATE, 12\/2013: I’ve created a Spotify playlist<\/a> with most of these songs plus a few I should have included but didn’t hear in time for the original rankings.<\/p>\n