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Hello, visitors, I've semi-retired from my hobby of burning regular audio CDs, at least for myself, and as all of my present major listening devices (computer, CD/cassette boombox, DVD player in living room, car CD player) are MP3 compatible, I've been concentrating on making MP3 audio CDs with 100+ songs on them. Most Top 100-of-anything lists end up having more than 100 songs on them anyway once you put them on a CD, because of occasional two-sided hits, where I had to include both songs that were listed.

My first few projects consisted of putting each of the following playlists--mainly fan or insider polls of all-time greatest songs--onto one disk:

  1. Rolling Stone & MTV: 100 Greatest Pop Songs (compiled in 2000)
  2. BBC News: The Top 100 Number One Singles
  3. Rock 'n World's visitors vote for Top 100 Songs all time
  4. BMI Top 100 Songs of the Century
  5. VH1: The 100 Greatest Songs of Rock and Roll
  6. VH1: 100 Greatest Dance Songs
  7. CMT 100 Greatest Songs of Country Music

    I also worked on the following six-disc series, that chronologically listed all songs that made it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1955-1999, the last year for which I had any reliable data, because the year 2000 was when Joel Whitburn published the 7th edition of "The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits," and he tends to wait three or four years in between updates:

  8. Disc 1: 1955-1963
  9. Disc 2: 1964-1972
  10. Disc 3: 1973-1979
  11. Disc 4: 1980-1985
  12. Disc 5: 1986-1989
  13. Disc 6: 1990-1999

    My next project was a three disc series that included the Top 500+ songs of the 1980's, the decade during which I was in my teens and early '20s, and subsequently the decade during which I followed popular music trends the closest, before losing interest when the pop charts began being dominated by rap/hip-hop. No offense intended to anyone for whom those particular genres are a personal favorite; they just don't do a whole lot for me. This was based on the 1995 edition of Fred Bronson's "Billboard's Hottest Hot 100 Hits."

  14. 1980's Hits-Disc 1
  15. 1980's Hits-Disc 2
  16. 1980's Hits-Disc 3

    I also made a "Top 100 Hits of 2002" collection, based on the following webpage, though naturally I'd have preferred a year-end chart from an "official" source, like Billboard, but alas, to access any of their archives online, you have to be a paying/subscriber member, which I wouldn't have minded if we were talking $20 or so, but I looked and it was more like $200. No thanks!

  17. Rock On the Net: Top Songs of 2002

    After I'd made these compilations, the third edition of Fred Bronson's "Billboard's Hottest Hot 100 Hits" came out in 2003, and so I set out to compile each of the year-end top 100 lists, in reverse chronological order, or at least until I hit a year when there are more songs I don't recognize than ones that I do, which I expect to happen sometime in the '60s or '50s. I also suspect there will eventually come a point when the lower ranked songs, particularly those by really obscure recording artists, become impossible to find, even with the combined resources of Kazaa, WinMx, Morpheus, etc. These differ from the lists that Billboard itself would have published at the end of the year, in that songs whose chart runs covered parts of two different calendar years (i.e. late 2000 and early 2001) were no longer penalized, and get credit for their full chart lives. So far I've gotten 1965-2001 actually turned into disks (yes, I've officially been at this for so long, I am now dealing only with songs older than ME), but all available year-end counts are on here, for your reference as well as my own.

  18. Top 100 Songs of 1956
  19. Top 100 Songs of 1957
  20. Top 100 Songs of 1958
  21. Top 100 Songs of 1959
  22. Top 100 Songs of 1960
  23. Top 100 Songs of 1961
  24. Top 100 Songs of 1962
  25. Top 100 Songs of 1963
  26. Top 100 Songs of 1964
  27. Top 100 Songs of 1965
  28. Top 100 Songs of 1966
  29. Top 100 Songs of 1967
  30. Top 100 Songs of 1968
  31. Top 100 Songs of 1969
  32. Top 100 Songs of 1970
  33. Top 100 Songs of 1971
  34. Top 100 Songs of 1972
  35. Top 100 Songs of 1973
  36. Top 100 Songs of 1974
  37. Top 100 Songs of 1975
  38. Top 100 Songs of 1976
  39. Top 100 Songs of 1977
  40. Top 100 Songs of 1978
  41. Top 100 Songs of 1979
  42. Top 100 Songs of 1980
  43. Top 100 Songs of 1981
  44. Top 100 Songs of 1982
  45. Top 100 Songs of 1983
  46. Top 100 Songs of 1984
  47. Top 100 Songs of 1985
  48. Top 100 Songs of 1986
  49. Top 100 Songs of 1987
  50. Top 100 Songs of 1988
  51. Top 100 Songs of 1989
  52. Top 100 Songs of 1990
  53. Top 100 Songs of 1991
  54. Top 100 Songs of 1992
  55. Top 100 Songs of 1993
  56. Top 100 Songs of 1994
  57. Top 100 Songs of 1995
  58. Top 100 Songs of 1996
  59. Top 100 Songs of 1997
  60. Top 100 Songs of 1998
  61. Top 100 Songs of 1999
  62. Top 100 Songs of 2000
  63. Top 100 Songs of 2001

    Also, here are five Top 100 of a Decade lists (also according to the Bronson book) that I've got typed up and that I've also got on CD. These were fairly easy to put together, because I'd already had to acquire many of the same songs for the #1 series I mentioned four paragraphs back, and all I had to do was reorder them, but these lists also gave some songs that had long chart runs, but only peaked at #2 or #3 a chance to be on a list, so there ARE some songs on this list that wouldn't have been on those other CDs. In any case, since I had most of the songs already, it only took me two and a half days to do all five of these.

  64. Top 100 Songs of the Fifties
  65. Top 100 Songs of the Sixties
  66. Top 100 Songs of the Seventies
  67. Top 100 Songs of the Eighties
  68. Top 100 Songs of the Nineties

    So what is the main purpose of this page? Well, those of you who are my local friends IRL are free to request virtually anything on this page (within reason--the necessary supplies aren't free, after all, plus I do have limitations on my free time), though you'd have to specify whether you want an MP3 disk like I've been making for myself, or if you want the compilations broken down into regular CDs, in case you don't have presently have anything other than your computer that is MP3-compatible. (The rest of you can at least refer to these lists and if you like something you see, can download the necessary songs on some file-sharing program or another and burn the CDs yourselves.) Jewel cases and the packaging that goes with them will not be provided, because those cost money and take up time that I just don't have (besides which, it's impossible to fit the contents of an MP3 disk into a two-fold jacket anyway), but if I do know you IRL, I would probably at least put a binder together with the Tables of Contents printed out and put into page protectors, or something like that. That's pretty much what I did for the 20 or so CDs that I keep in my two car visors to keep me awake and entertained during those long drives, or even for just running errands around town.

    Though as comprehensive as one of these collections can be, it's still nice to able to pick a theme and "run with it" and make a regular audio CD where the playlist is completely up to me. After all, if I'm just compiling songs according to some list that somebody else put together, I can't really take credit for any of the songs being "cool" or be blamed for any of the "cheesy" ones. It's nice once in a while to have something that's customized both according to my own personal tastes, and to those of the person on the receiving end, or at least to what I think they might like.

    Plus if I can put together something special for somebody, it'll remind me a little of my "glory days" as a music compilation maker. Sure, nowadays with CD-burners and peer-to-peer networks, anybody with a CD-RW drive in their computer and a fast online connection can pretty much do the same thing I've been doing for themselves, but I was able to do it when almost no one else could. I could put together compilations just like some of the ones I mentioned, using only whatever I had in my own music collection, which was possibly the most comprehensive one you were likely to run into outside of a music store, radio station, etc. We're talking 656 CDs, 788 cassettes, 46 LPs, the last time I did a "census" on them roughly three years ago. The CD number would have grown since then, but the others would have either stayed the same or shrank. Granted, I could only put the songs onto an audio tape back then, but it still was impressive at the time. Now anybody can do it, and I feel so obsolete. Sob! Excuse me while I go somewhere to sulk, and isn't it fortunate that I've got song collections to listen to for exactly such moods?

    Last, but not least of my music-related interests, I've been quite the Karaoke addict lately. I'd gone occasionally before my son was born, then took kind of a six year absence from it, but I'd already had experience with performing onstage in public due to participating in choir, beauty pageants, high school/college talent shows, musical theater, etc. for nearly six years. That was actually harder since there's no monitor/prompter to read off of, and one just has to sing from memory to a backup tape, so modern karaoke is a breeze by comparison. I still retain an ungodly attraction to really "showoffish" songs due to my competitive days, but mostly my song selection has to do with wanting to not repeat myself TOO much, and trying to maintain a good balance between slow vs. up-tempo songs, as well as representing all the main genres (R&B, pop/rock, country) as evenly as possible--and yes, entertaining the audience does factor in there somewhere. Here is a list of all the songs I've performed since really getting back into karaoke in late April of 2003. Each song is only mentioned once--on its debut date along with whomever originally recorded the version I sang, and where I performed it, though granted, the location names will be meaningless to anybody who lives outside of my immediate area. It often comes in handy for jogging my memory about other things happening around the time I debuted a certain set of songs, or for gauging the true level of my addiction? ["I went to karaoke night somewhere how many times during that one two-week period? 11!"]

    In closing, I'll just mention two slightly amusing facts. I was named after the patron saint of music--Cecilia--and perhaps have been subconsciously trying to live it up to that ever since. (The music part anyway. I'm pretty much a lost cause on the "saint" part of it.) I was also told once when I was 14 by an older sister that some girls in our cheerleading squad were making fun of me, because I was singing the words wrong to some song I was trying to sing along with, and I really "needed to know music better," so I've been overcompensating ever since. Is the verdict still out? Do I know music well enough yet? :)

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