All-Time Chart (1992-2012)

The first edition of the all-time chart was done in October 2012 to celebrate the chart’s 20-year anniversary. The charts featured the top 100 performing songs and the top 50 artists. (Only the top 40 artists were featured on the Chart Beat, but artists 41-50 were listed in a Billboard issue).

About
The week of Oct. 3, 1992, Billboard premiered the Pop Songs radio airplay chart, as then-new Nielsen BDS-based monitoring technology allowed for unprecedented accuracy in gauging the biggest hits on mainstream top 40 radio.

Exactly 20 years later, let's celebrate the anniversary by counting down the top 100 songs on the Pop Songs chart over the past two decades. From rock to rap and R&B to country, let's see who has hooked the top-charting mainstream top 40 airplay hits from 1992 through 2012. Kelly Clarkson and Maroon 5 each boast the most titles on the tally - four (while Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine logs a fifth entry as a featured solo artist) - but, does either act claim the all-time top song?

Chart criteria
The 20th anniversary Mainstream Top 40 top songs and top artists rankings is based on actual performance on Billboard's weekly BDS-based Pop Songs radio airplay chart dating to its inception (Oct. 3, 1992). Songs are ranked based on an inverse point system, with weeks at No. 1 earning the greatest value and weeks at No. 40 earning the least. To ensure equitable representation, certain time frames were weighted to account for the difference between chart turnover rates during those years, as recurrent rules have changed multiple times.