Every Song That Ever Mattered, Sorted by Year

Someone built a website that catalogs the defining hits of every year going back to 1901, and I’ve now lost an entire afternoon to it. Favtape organizes music chronologically—Lady Sovereign next to Elvis Presley next to Van Halen, depending on where you land. It sounds chaotic. It’s actually kind of perfect.

The interface will look familiar if you remember Muxtape, that brief and beautiful music-sharing site that disappeared almost as soon as people started loving it. Favtape borrowed the aesthetic and filled it with actual history. Click on 1967 and you’re somewhere else entirely. Click on 1983 and you remember why everything after felt like a hangover. The chronological structure does something a shuffle never could—it gives you context. A song heard next to what else was playing that year lands differently than a song dropped into an algorithmic void.

The rabbit hole is genuinely deep. There’s no correct entry point—start at the year you were born, start where your taste runs out and see what’s on the other side. I keep going back to decades I thought I knew and finding I didn’t.