Visualizing the Best-Selling iTunes Songs of All Time

Apple iTunes is closing in on the titanic milestone of 10 billion songs sold, and they’ve just announced their best-selling songs of all-time. Looking at the titles listed is hard enough (nothing about “TiK ToK” will ever seem okay), but our masochistic tendencies inspired us to create word clouds for every one of the top 12 songs. (Thank you, Wordle.)

These clouds weigh the appearance of certain lyrics within the songs and create charts assigning size status based on word frequency. If you’ve ever bemoaned the state of modern commercial music, the inanity of looking at these consolidated lyrics will do nothing to ease your pain. But it is kind of funny. Commiserate with us after the jump.

1. “I Gotta Feeling,” Black Eyed Peas

2. “Poker Face” Lady Gaga

3. “Boom Boom Pow” Black Eyed Peas

4. “I’m Yours” Jason Mraz

5. “Viva la Vida” Coldplay

6. “Just Dance” Lady Gaga & Colby O’Donis

7. “Low” Flo Rida

8. “Love Story” Taylor Swift

9. “Bleeding Love” Leona Lewis

10. “TiK ToK” Ke$ha

11. “Disturbia” Rihanna

12. “So What” Pink

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[...] wrap my head around the all-time top 10 songs sold on iTunes (out of 10 billion!) until this visual aid brought some much-needed clarity to the issue. [...]

[...] wrap my head around the all-time top 10 songs sold on iTunes (out of 10 billion!) until this visual aid brought some much-needed clarity to the issue. [...]

I have been reading your entries all over my morning break, and I will have to admit the entire article has been very enlightening and very well written. I thought I'd mean you can know that for a few reason this blog does no longer view neatly in Internet Explorer 8. I want Microsoft could forestall converting their software. I have a question for you. May you mind changing weblog roll links? That may be truly neat!

Just looking at this, and you can see how vacuous and uninteresting the lyrics in pop-music today are.

Encapsulates it real nicely.

[...] Visualizing the Best-Selling iTunes Songs of All Time [...]

Get: SO BAD - Quavius / from (NEW START ...the Foundation)

WHAT IS LOVE - Quavius

JUST ORDINARY PEOPLE - QUEEN Diva

COULD IT BE - Laura Eliece Alford

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  1. [...] Visualizing the Best-Selling iTunes Songs of All Time [...]

  2. [...] wrap my head around the all-time top 10 songs sold on iTunes (out of 10 billion!) until this visual aid brought some much-needed clarity to the issue. [...]

  3. [...] wrap my head around the all-time top 10 songs sold on iTunes (out of 10 billion!) until this visual aid brought some much-needed clarity to the issue. [...]