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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 songs of the year according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts that were published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush we’ll be counting down 2009, the year the rest of the American economy caught up with the music biz, and not in a good way.

Music, still reeling from going-on ten years of revenue free-fall from online filesharing due to the failure of the industry in its lucrative CD bubble in the ’90s to grasp the inevitability of online distribution and figure out with a way to monetize it.

And for the rest of the economy, the subprime mortgage crisis: a failure to see the problem with lending $4.6 trillion to 27 million unqualified home buyers whose current and future job prospects are at the same time being offshored to China and other developing countries. China’s economy thrived during the Great Recession.

Banks had made the so-called “non-traditional” loans, but it was good ‘ol Uncle Sam that’d set up the rules and incentives, and taxpayers wound up footing the bill: hundreds of billions in TARP bailouts of “troubled assets.” “Too big to fail,” was the new catchphrase as the new President Barack Obama was settling into the White House: banks that had to be bailed out because not doing so would tank the economy even worse.

Consumer credit card debt also totally out of control, nearly doubling during George W. Bush’s presidency. Simply ignoring basic economic rules and realities and living beyond your means: a feature of American life in the ’00s, ever since 20-something computer geeks in the ’90 started becoming overnight tycoons with little more than an intriguing idea, a bit of buzz and a good PowerPoint for investors.

Free music on internet filesharing platforms, also a part of that, of course. And it all hit the fan at the end of ’08. Nine million jobs lost. $13 trillion in household net worth, gone. Stocks in freefall. 567 Circuit City stores, closed, one of the last big box retail stores where you could buy CDs. Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, HMV and most other music chains, already 2-4 years in the rear view.

And ironically the Recording Industry Association of America chose that moment, with annual revenue from legal paid downloads on iTunes and other platforms hitting a billion for the first time in ’08, to stop suing individual fans for filesharing. 35,000 lawsuits since 2003 according to the Wall Street Journal.

But besides signing up for Facebook, playing Angry Birds on their iPhones or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on their xBox 360s, or hitting theaters to make The Hangover the biggest R-rated Comedy ever (that’s appropriate, right?), what do young Americans in tough times do? Well, they dance of course!

Whether it’s Big Bands in ballrooms in the Great Depression, or Discos in the late ’70s, when the chips are down, no better escape, so in ’09, Electronic Dance Music finally went mainstream Stateside a full two decades after the Rave scene exploded across the U.K. and Europe.

Top40 Radio went all-in, big-name EDM DJs and producers started collaborating with Pop Singers and soon U.S. electronic music festivals like Electric Daisy and Ultra were drawing Woodstock-sized crowds, and everyone’s idea of what a Pop hit was supposed to sound like got a major update.

#10 Kings of Leon – Use Somebody

But we’re going to kick off our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown with something different that managed to make the cut at #10 by sticking around on the charts for a crazy long time, 57 weeks, longer than every other song in ’09 except for one, but only got as high as #4. Three brothers from a suburb of Nashville, sons of a traveling Preacher and their cousin, who landed a deal with RCA in ’02.

Their early stuff made them critics’ darlings and got them on Alternative radio along with The Strokes, Killers, White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs with their Southern take on the ’00s Garage Rock Revival, but the hits off their ’08 album Only by the Night made them the biggest Alternative crossover act of the late ’00s. It’s Kings of Leon’s second charting single and only career top 20 hit, “Use Somebody.”

Chart longevity, just about the only way Rock or Country songs were making the top 10 on year-end Hot100 rankings in the ’00, and there were only a handful of #1s by acts who also made the Mainstream or Modern Rock Airplay charts, almost all from the first three years of the decade, but Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody” was a late ’00s standout with its 57 weeks on the Hot100.

Now, the last 15 of those weeks were in Billboard‘s 2010 chart year, so not counting those, they have it at #14 for ’09. But at Chartcrush since we don’t have to compile a chart before New Years with incomplete information, we count songs’ full chart runs and rank them in the year they earned most of their points, and that puts “Use Somebody” at #10 for ’09: one of four songs here on our ’09 Chartcrush Countdown that didn’t make Billboard‘s top 10 on the year, and the only Rock song.

#9 Lady Gaga – Poker Face

At #9, the first of two this hour by the newcomer who more than anyone signaled the arrival of Pop’s new EDM era. Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” were the first hits in ’06, both futuristic-sounding Timbaland productions. Then Rapper Kanye West sampled EDM trendsetters Daft Punk on his chart topper “Stronger” in ’07, and heading into ’08, none other than Britney Spears dove in headfirst into the new sound on her first album in four years, Blackout.

But unlike those, this Singer was a blank slate and her debut inching up the chart for 22 weeks in late ’08 was the mirror image of major economic indicators falling before hitting rock bottom in January just as the song was hitting #1, which gave it—and her—a cultural relevance that’s rare in Pop history.

We’ll be hearing that debut hit later in the countdown, but at #9, her more distinctive second hit that entered the Hot100 in January and was in the top 10 all Spring as she unleashed her unique persona on the world and critics started comparing her to Madonna. At #9, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, a.k.a. Lady Gaga. “Poker Face.”

“Poker Face” was #1 for just one week in April, but would’ve had nine if not for the Black Eyed Peas, who locked down the #1 spot with two hits for a combined 26 straight weeks immediately after, all the way to October, a new Hot100 record. Gaga got stuck at #2 for eight weeks after hitting #1, but “Poker Face” did make Lady Gaga the first artist since Christina Aguilera in 2000 to top the Hot 100 with her first two hits, and her debut album The Fame yielded two other top 10s besides.

Quite a start, and from her start honing her over-the-top Pop Art schtick in New York’s underground Gay and Drag scene, Gaga’s mission, she told Out magazine in ’09, was “to inject Gay culture into the mainstream [and] turn the world Gay.” Gay marriage, the latest front in the Postmodern Culture Wars, and Miss California Carrie Prejean for one suddenly found herself with a target on her back after Gossip Blogger Perez Hilton didn’t like her answer to his question about it in the Miss USA Pageant, said it was why she didn’t win, and put her on blast. Pageant owner Donald Trump among others pointed out that even the President, Obama, believed marriage should be between men and women, but Prejean eventually lost her title anyway.

#8 T.I. featuring Rihanna – Live Your Life

Now, when Billboard added paid digital downloads to its Hot100 calculus in 2005, it was the first new purely consumer-driven chart component, well, ever, the only other being sales of physical singles, which had dwindled to next to nothing by 2000: all formats, vinyl, cassette, CD. So for the first half of the ’00s, the Hot100 was basically an Airplay chart.

Well, by 2009, legal, paid mp3 downloads on Apple’s iTunes and other platforms were raking in $2½ billion a year as fans rushed to get the latest earworm on their iPods, and since ’07, iPhones for 99 cents a song. Still just a drop in the bucket compared to the download volume on filesharing platforms, none of which was factored into the charts, but enough that huge one-week 20-plus position jumps to #1 started happening pretty regularly, not just once in a blue moon or when there was a new American Idol winner.

Well for a time, the Rapper at #8 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2009’s top 10 hits was the undisputed King of massive download-driven one-week chart jumps. “Whatever You Like” went from #71 to #1 in a single week in ’08, but in ’09, he broke his own record when this one went from #80 to #1 its second week. At #8, it’s T.I. featuring Rihanna, “Live Your Life.”

Nope, not a glitch; that’s the ending! On the album, the last word’s on a fading delay but they left that off the Radio version we just heard for some reason.

T.I. recorded his ’08 album Paper Trail at home in Atlanta under house arrest on gun charges he later spent most of 2011 in prison for, and he did a lot of his court-ordered community service speaking to Teens about staying out of trouble. His shout-out to the troops in Iraq at the beginning of “Live My Life,” #8 on our 2009 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Coundown Show: a rare example of a major ’00s hitmaker engaging with world affairs. Just a quick shout-out, but people noticed.

They noticed Rihanna on the hook too, of course, a big boost: the first of Re-Re’s many, many guest appearances on hit Rap records, but “Live Your Life” also got juice for sampling the cheesy Moldavan ElectroPop track that New Jersey Vlogger Gary Brolsma lip-synched and chair danced to in his 2005 “Numa Numa Dance” vid, one of the first ultra-viral videos, from the pre-YouTube Flash platform Newgrounds.

Producer Just Blaze had made the beat as a goof, but when T.I. urgently needed something, that’s what he got, and in a chart environment increasingly influenced by meme culture, it was the biggest hit of his career. His record 79 position jump from #80 to #1 in one week didn’t stand long. Britney Spears beat it literally the next week when “Womanizer” jumped from #96 to #1, and then Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You,” #97 to #1 just a couple months later. Once Streaming overtook downloads, epic chart jumps ceased being all that noteworthy. 2015 to 2023, four out of every 10 #1s debuted at #1.

By the way, “Live Your Life,” another of the four songs in our countdown that’s not in the top 10 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 ranking. Since its chart run straddled ’08 into ’09, they have it at #18 for ’09 and #37 for ’08. Again, at Chartcrush we sum up every song’s full run, and then rank it in whichever calendar year it earned the most points. All of “Live Your Life’s” six weeks at #1 were in late ’08, but its 16 weeks descending the chart January to April make it a 2009 hit.

#7 Jay Sean featuring Lil Wayne – Down

And we have a similar situation at #7, but in this case the song straddles ’09 into ’10, not ’08 into ’09. Billboard has it at #20 for ’09, #41 for 2010, but factoring its full run puts it at #7 for ’09.

Remember that epic 26-week run at #1 I mentioned that forced “Poker Face” to #2 for eight weeks in the Spring? Well this is the song that ended that streak in October, and as it scaled up the charts late Summer, the Singer-Songwriter told Billboard the song was conceived as a distraction from everything being so down in the dumps. “Why don’t we write a song to take everyone’s mind away from being down?” he said.

With everyone talking up India’s Bollywood movie industry in ’08 and ’09 and Slumdog Millionaire set in India sweeping the Oscars, it was kind of a no-brainer to sign the top name out of London’s thriving South Asian music scene to a U.S. deal, and Lil Wayne’s Cash Money Records pounced. Wayne’s even on the track, heavily AutoTuned as usual. The Singer didn’t know that was gonna happen until he heard the finished song.

What’s not on the track? Any trace of India besides the Singer’s heritage, but between “The Macarena” in ’96 and “Despacito” in 2017, U.S. hits with overt World influences? Virtually non-existent. At #7 it’s Kamaljit Singh Jhooti, British-born son of Indian immigrants, a.k.a. Jay Sean, “Down.”

Jay Sean with Lil Wayne, “Down,” #7 here on our 2009 edition of Chartcrush. Sean had been big in the U.K. and really big in India and some other places and Cash Money’s Stateside gamble with him paid off with “Down,” but his follow-up “Do You Remember” only got to #10, and from there the hits got scarcer and scarcer so essentially, he was a one-hit wonder. But just as he intended, “Down” was a definitive Great Recession hit.

#6 Lady Gaga featuring Colby O’Donis – Just Dance

The definitive Recession hit, though, is up next at #6, and I already talked it up pretty good introing the Singer’s second hit we heard back at #9, “Poker Face.” This was her first, just a little less than a year before “Down’s” run on the charts, but with the same message to go get completely hammered and sweat it out on the dancefloor: the time-tested antidote to the panic of watching helplessly as your hopes and dreams evaporate into a surreal fog of oddly-calm talking heads on TV.

Although she couldn’t have predicted the economic Armageddon that would fuel its success when she wrote the song in January of ’08, the title couldn’t be more clear about what to do. At #6, again, Lady Gaga, “Just Dance.”

#6 on our Chartcrush countdown of 2009’s top 10 hits, Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” co-written with Producer RedOne and Akon, still hot after his string of hits in ’06 and ’07. He was originally the featured Male Singer on it, but his label had a problem with that so he recruited his protégé Colby O’Donis. It’s still an uncredited Akon doing the fill-ins on the verses though.

Gaga wrote the song having just moved from New York to L.A. to complete her album The Fame, and later recalled that she had “one shot to write the song that would change [her] life” and she wrote it in ten minutes hungover from the night before! It took 22 weeks to top the chart: the longest climb to #1 since Creed’s “Arms Wide Open” in 2000.

#5 Taylor Swift – You Belong with Me

OK at #s 5 and 4, check this out, we’ve got a twofer: back-to-back songs in the countdown by the Millennial Teen who was already a phenom in Country since ’06, the year after her fellow Millennial Carrie Underwood won American Idol Season Four and started a mid-’00s gold rush for new Female Country crossover talent. LeAnn Rimes’ abrupt shift to Pop hadn’t worked out as planned, and GenX superstars Shania Twain, Faith Hill and Jewel, all struggling.

Now Carrie Underwood herself went on to sell over 20 million albums in the U.S., but this Singer’s relatable songs and instinct for Pop hooks, especially after going all-in on Pop in the mid ’10s, made her music’s first Billionaire “solely from songwriting and performing,” according to Forbes in 2023. Jay-Z, Rihanna and Jimmy Buffett had already hit ten digits, but with side-hustles in fashion, beauty and spirits brands, et cetera.

And she scored her first two big Hot100 hits in 2009. Neither of them got to #1 but both were top 10s and among the top five longest charting hits of the year. At #5, the later of the two on the calendar, on the chart 50 weeks, May ’09 to April of 2010, which of course splits its run between Billboard chart years so they’ve got it at #11 for ’09 and #57 for 2010. But adding it all up, it’s #5 for ’09. It’s Taylor Swift, “You Belong with Me.”

Taylor Swift, “You Belong with Me,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2009 and the video that beat out Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” for Best Female at the 2009 MTV VMAs, prompting Rapper Kanye West to jump onstage, grab the mic from Taylor in the middle of her acceptance speech and proclaim that “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” Later Beyoncé won the night’s top prize, Video of the Year, but if you didn’t know Taylor Swift before that, you did now!

Kanye’s stunt made national headlines in a year of intensifying racial politics Obama’s first year as President, and just two months after the President’s Beer Summit with a Black Harvard Professor and the White Cambridge, Massachusetts Cop he, Obama, had earlier implied was guilty of racial profiling.

Post Kanye and VMAs, Taylor Swift was everywhere, hosting Saturday Night Live, guesting on CSI, and on the big screen, a cameo in the Hannah Montana movie and a part in the rom-com Valentine’s Day. And seven cuts from the Platinum Edition of her second album Fearless racking up enough downloads to make the Top40 in November.

#4 Taylor Swift – Love Story

But her biggest hit of ’09, #4 in the countdown, was the lead single from Fearless at the beginning of the year: kind of a sleeper hit. It peaked at #5 its second week in the Fall of ’08 when the album came out, but faded over the next two months, only to rebound and re-enter the top 10 in January and stay 11 weeks. 49 weeks on the chart altogether, one less than “You Belong with Me,” but by a slim margin, a stronger chart run on points. At #4, again Taylor Swift: “Love Story.”

With her first album in ’06, the magazine PopMatters had described Taylor Swift as “Country music, Disney style,” adding that she “speaks to a constituency…pretty much ignored since LeAnn Rimes.” With Fearless though, critics were nearly unanimous in praising the maturity of her songwriting. “Love Story,” Fearless‘ lead single and biggest hit, #4 our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2009.

But technically not her first top 10 hit. That was “Change,” a free iTunes download that dropped in August ’08 to promote AT&T’s Team USA Soundtrack CD, and also used by NBC for their nightly Beijing Olympics highlights. Yes, free downloads did factor on the chart, but only on legit platforms. It only charted two more weeks after debuting at #10 though, so “Love Story” was Taylor’s first proper big hit. The top-charting song from her debut in ’07 was “Teardrops on My Guitar,” which peaked at #13.

#3 Jason Mraz – I’m Yours

So I’ve been talking a lot this hour about chart longevity because it was the decisive factor that got several songs into our top 10 on the year. But none more so than our #3 hit, which broke LeAnn Rimes’ all-time record for weeks on the Hot100 set in 1998 with “How Do I Live.” Before all was said and done, it’d notched 76 weeks, never getting higher than #6, but all those weeks add up!

It made Billboard‘s year-end top 10 for ’09 too, and they didn’t even count the first 21 of those 76 weeks that fell into their 2008 chart year. Those were enough to make it their #27 song of ’08 as well as #7 for ’09, but when you ignore those arbitrary “chart year” delineations and factor the song’s entire 76-week run into the calendar year in which it had the majority of its chart action—our Chartcrush ranking method—it comes out #3 for ’09. It’s Virginia-raised, San Diego-nurtured Singer-Songwriter Jason Mraz (he honed his chops in the same coffee shop where Jewel started out in the ’90s): “I’m Yours.”

Jason Mraz’s “happy little Hippie song,” as he was calling it in interviews, “I’m Yours” at #3. In 2016, Stereogum‘s Chris DeVille included Jason Mraz in a “lineage of peppy young White guys slinging folky Pop songs that both Teens and their adult Chaperones can appreciate,” citing Gavin DeGraw, Jack Johnson and John Mayer before, and Ed Sheeran and Lukas Graham after; all solo acts.

But literally one week after “I’m Yours'” dropped off the chart in October of ’09, Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” debuted and scratched the same itch for the next 54 weeks on its way to being the #4 Hot100 hit, and Billboard‘s #2 Adult Contemporary song, of 2010. “I’m Yours” was #1 on that ranking for ’09. Adult chaperones, indeed!

Mraz’s record 76 weeks on the Hot100 with “I’m Yours” held for four years. Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” notched 87 in 2014.

#2 Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow

And that gets us down to the top two songs here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2009 and another twofer. Yup, the top two songs of the year: both by the same act: only year for that ever in our Chartcrush rankings all the way back to 1940.

I mentioned them back before we heard Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” at #9: the act whose record-breaking 26 consecutive weeks at #1 with their two back-to-back hits kept “Poker Face” out of the top spot for eight weeks. Their dominance in ’09, along with Lady Gaga, signaled the arrival of the Electro-Dance Pop sound that soundtracked the Millennial generation’s cultural peak, when almost everyone in the media’s target 18-34 demographic was a Millennial, roughly 2011 to 2015. And we get to hear their two back-to-back #1s in chronological order. First up, #1 for the first 12 of the 26 weeks, from April to the 4th of July, at #2 it’s The Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.”

Will.i.am was the Black Eyed Peas musical and marketing visionary with his “bubble” production philosophy redefining the pursuit of commercial success as art, but Fergie was the star of the show in ’09. The Peas had been charting hits since ’01, including three top 10s, but Fergie’s string of five solo top 10s off her album The Dutchess (including three #1s) in ’06 and ’07 set the table for the Peas’ surge in ’09 with their fifth album The E.N.D.

“Boom Boom Pow,” the lead single, intended for clubs, but when radio jumped all over it too, even Will was surprised. “There’s no such thing as a radio song anymore,” he told Billboard. “Radio is what the people want.”

“Boom Boom Pow” had to be cleaned up for the AM/FM airwaves and that’s the version we just heard here on our 2009 edition of Chartcrush. But no language restrictions on satellite radio, and with Shock Jock Howard Stern taking millions of his listeners with him to Sirius XM, by ’09, terrestrial radio was worried enough that the Radio Edit of “Boom Boom Pow” doesn’t just remove the profanity; it also scrubs the word “satellite” from Will’s line “here we go satellite radio” halfway through the song!

#1 Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling

At #1 of course, the Peas’ biggest hit of the year, #1 for the second half (plus two) of that record-breaking 26-week run, 14 weeks, July to October. Like Jay Sean’s “Down,” according to Fergie, a party song specifically to lift people up during the financial crisis.

But as it turned out, the week it took the top spot from “Boom Boom Pow,” Pop fans had a brand new reason to be shocked and dismayed: the sudden death of Michael Jackson from an OD of an anesthetic his personal doctor gave him as a sleep aid. On July 11, Michael grabbed nine of the top 10 spots on the Pop Catalog Albums chart, and five of the top 10 on the Hot Digital Songs chart. And kept that up for weeks, but didn’t affect this song’s run at #1 on the Hot100. Again, The Black Eyed Peas, with “I Gotta Feeling.”

“Boom Boom Pow” at #2 and “I Got a Feeling” at #1: Black Eyed Peas snagging the top two spots on our 2009 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown: the only year with the same act at #’s 1 and 2 on our Chartcrush rankings, 1940 to now, but it’s happened three times in Billboard: Beatles 1964; Usher 2004, and Justin Bieber 2016. For ’09, Billboard had “I Gotta Feeling” at #4, as you might’ve guessed, because its chart run, split between their ’09 and 2010 chart years. They have it at #29 for 2010 as well. But counting that whole chart run makes it 2009’s biggest hit by a mile.

Bonus

That’s the fourth song in our top 10 with a chart run that spilled over into 2010 and didn’t get fully counted in Billboard‘s ranking, and another two that didn’t because they started out in ’08. Of those six year-straddling hits, “I Gotta Feeling” and Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” should’ve ranked higher and did in our Chartcrush rankings but still made Billboard‘s top 10. The other four, not so lucky, as I’ve been pointing out.

To review, Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody,” T.I. and Rihanna’s “Live Your Life,” Jay Sean & Lil Wayne’s “Down” and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me:” none of those four made Billboard‘s top 10, only because of when they were hits during the year. So unfair! So we correct the record. But those four coming in to our Chartcrush top 10 for ’09 bumps four songs out from Billboard‘s, so in the time we have left, just to be thorough, let’s look at those!

#19 The All-American Rejects – Gives You Hell

We had Kings of Leon at #10, a genuine crossover from the Alternative chart; #1 there for three weeks. Billboard had a different Rock band at #10, but their big Hot100 hit got little-to-no airplay on Rock stations, Alternative or Mainstream. Those audiences and stations by the late ’00s shunning Bands and songs perceived to be too far to the Pop side of the Rock spectrum, like, apparently, The All-American Rejects’ “Gives You Hell.”

Billboard‘s #10 song of 2009, “Gives You Hell,” The All-American Rejects, Emo Rockers from Oklahoma who broke through on the Alternative chart in ’03 with “Swing, Swing,” but couldn’t find a new lane once the Pop charts moved on from Emo heading into the ’10s. #19 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top 10 from earlier this hour, but “Gives You Hell” was their last hit.

#13 Kanye West – Heartless

Billboard‘s #9 song was the year’s biggest hit by the late ’00s top Rapper, nudged to #13 on our ranking, Kanye West’s “Heartless.”

Kanye’s album 808s & Heartbreak continued what he’d started in ’07 on Graduation, blazing the trail of bringing EDM sounds into Hip-Hop. “Heartless,” the album’s biggest hit.

#18 Beyoncé – Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)

I mentioned Kanye’s stunt snagging Taylor Swift’s mic at the MTV Awards earlier to proclaim another video the greatest of all time. Well that song was #8 on Billboard‘s year-end chart, and shakes out at #18 on our Chartcrush ranking for ’09. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”

Billboard‘s last issue of 2009 not only recapped the year, it recapped the whole decade, and named Beyoncé the top-charting Female of the ’00s. The video for “Single Ladies,” Kanye West’s GOAT of videos, sparked a cross-cultural dance craze that introduced the world to jazz hands and inspired a parody on Saturday Night Live featuring Queen Bey and a trio of men including Justin Timberlake. “Halo,” “If I Were a Boy,” “Sweet Dreams,” and “Diva:” four other ’08 and ’09 top 10s from her album I Am Sasha Fierce.

#11 Flo Rida featuring Ke$ha – Right Round

And finally, Billboard‘s #6 song of 2009 just misses the top 10 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down earlier at #11. Based on a New Wave dance hit from 1985, Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” it’s his second #1 after “Low” in ’08, Flo Rida’s “Right Round.”

“Right Round,” Flo Rida’s ’09 Hip-Hop party anthem that introduced Ke$ha, for whom big things were right round the corner in the new decade. Her solo debut “TiK ToK” was the #1 song of 2010.

And that, folks, is gonna have to be a wrap for our 2009 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thank you for listening and hey, if you like what you heard, go check out our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript and link to the podcast version of the show, plus our full top100 chart, interactive chart run line graph and other hott extras that we do for every year we count down, ’40s to now. It’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

It’s a different year every week on this show, so be sure and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year and another edition of Chartcrush.

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