The Year in One Video

Daniel Kim’s Pop Danthology came out, which is how I catch up on the year in pop music. He takes every big song that blew up—Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, the Harlem Shake, whatever else—and stitches them together into one continuous track that somehow flows instead of falling apart into noise.

What gets me is the craftsmanship. Kim posts his process, and it looks straightforward until you think about what he’s actually doing. Finding the exact moment where one song can feed into the next without the energy dropping. Balancing everything so no single artist drowns out the year. He’s been refining this formula for years now, and it’s become this weird annual checkpoint. Not a ranking or review, just the year compressed into six minutes.

There’s something about that I can’t quite explain. It works practically—I didn’t listen closely enough to know every song that year, so this solves that problem. But it’s also proof that someone actually listened, that they cared about transitions and flow. It’s a document of what everyone was hearing, and if you pay attention, you can read the cultural moment in what made the cut.