The 100 Best Billboard Hot 100 No. 2 Hits: Staff List

The formula for getting to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 is tricky, imprecise, difficult to execute and often near-impossible to repeat. To pull it off, you need an explosive combination of pop excellence, cultural relevance, marketing savvy and perfect timing, and you need to be squarely aligned with an audience that’s constantly moving. And sometimes, you do everything right — from the writing to the performance to the release strategy to the promotional push — and you still end up just short of the ultimate goal.

Take one of the biggest and best-loved hits from the past year: Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need.” An immediately winning, modern-but-timeless-sounding song that rapidly crossed over to just about every radio format and streaming audience possible, Dean also spent months promoting the song with videos, interviews and high-profile performances. It delighted fans, it won awards, it soundtracked thousands of social media videos and earned countless cover versions. And at the end of the day, it peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100, right behind the chart juggernaut that is Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas.”

Hot 100 history is littered with such examples, of beyond-classic songs by legendary artists that for any number of reasons just couldn’t quite summit the chart. Bruce Springsteen has a resumé otherwise the equal of any other rock star in history, but his pop chart pinnacle had the unfortunate timing of coinciding with that of another all-time great — resulting in his “Dancing in the Dark” getting stuck on the chart behind Prince’s “When Doves Cry” for three weeks. Dr. Dre is one of the most important figures in rap history, and his “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” changed the course of popular music in the early ’90s — but the song was perhaps just a little too edgy to cruise past Snow’s “Informer” during its ’93 chart run. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Rock & Roll Hall of Famers still going strong 60 years after forming, peaked at No. 2 a staggering five times between March 1969 and October 1970, without once getting over the top. It happens, and there’s no shame in it.

In fact, we wanted to give these historic runner-ups a chance to take something of a long-overdue victory lap. So we’ve dug through our back pages for all 542 of the No. 2-peaking hits in the chart’s history, located the ones that we still have the most love for — including many of the aforementioned silver-medalists — and come up with a list of our 100 all-time favorites. (We’ve also included the songs that blocked each of them from the top spot, so you can decide how retroactively angry it’s worth getting at the respective injustices.) And for one particularly special No. 2 hit, we even gave it the opportunity of belatedly finishing No. 1 on a Billboard list.

Read on to find out about some songs you won’t believe were denied the Hot 100’s top spot — and some you might not have guessed would get as close as they did — and earn an extra appreciation for 68 years of a pop landscape competitive enough to produce this many truly classic bests-of-the-rest.