The Top 2000 is an annual Dutchmarathon radio programme that plays the 2,000 most popular songs listeners have deemed the best of all time. Hosted by the station NPO Radio 2 since 1999, it has since become "an indispensable part of the collective Dutch memory".[1]
The show runs 24 hours a day, starting on Christmas and ending on New Year's Eve, functioning as a countdown to the new year.[2][3] A significant part of the Netherlands' population listens to the broadcast each year;[4][5] during the 2023 edition, it had a national radio market share of 41.1 percent.[6] In regard of its popularity and notoriety, the show is often called de lijst der lijsten, the chart of charts.[7]
First held in 1999 to inaugurate the new millennium, the Top 2000 was intended to be a one-time event. It became immensely popular. Following this success, Radio 2 decided to make it an annual programme. The broadcast initially started at midnight on the day after Christmas (Dutch: Tweede Kerstdag, also known as Boxing Day), and since 2020 it has begun on the midnight of Christmas Day. It continues until midnight of New Year's Eve. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been the number-one voted song in all but five years.
The show is hosted in a temporary studio called the Top 2000 Café at the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision in Hilversum. Visitors are able to purchase a timed ticket to enter the studio. Because of the popularity of the show and the small size of the studio, visitors are only allowed to stay for a limited period of time.[8] The tickets have been known to sell out quickly.[9]
History
The first list
In the summer of 1998, Radio 2 station manager Kees Toering wanted to commemorate the new millennium by presenting a listener-compiled list of the 2000 best songs of the 20th century, aired between Christmas and New Year's Day. In September 1999, he presented this idea to his colleagues, who wanted to beat the listening figures of competitor Sky Radio.[10] However, many of his colleagues were skeptical because the station did not broadcast at night, it seemed unlikely that listeners would tune in during the late hours, and because Sky Radio dominated the market share during Christmas time because of their own special programming. DJ Frits Spits[nl] gave a passionate speech which helped convince the critics.[11]
The voting process was advertised on Spits, a free newspaper with a circulation of 450,000 distributed mostly amongst public transportation passengers. There was a coupon where one could write ten songs, cut it out and send to the station. It took days to manually record the results, and the top song was Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". The first song ever broadcast was John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" at No. 2000 on the midnight of 26 December 1999.[10] It was originally intended to be a one-time event, but the listening figures were higher than expected and the station decided to continue.[11]
2000s
In 2000, Jeanne Kooijmans became the first female DJ to present the Top 2000, although more women worked behind the scenes. In the early years, the final hours of the broadcast were pre-recorded. Then in 2004, it was broadcast in Almere on the houseboat of DJ Hans Schiffers[nl].[1] In 2005, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was knocked off the top spot for the first time, replaced by "Avond[nl]" by Boudewijn de Groot, after a campaign by Radio 2 DJ Bert Kranenbarg[nl]. In 2007, there were similar campaigns, one by the regional newspaper Dagblad van het Noorden to push Groningen singer Ede Staal to number one with "'t Het nog nooit zo donker west" and another by Christians on the social media platform Hyves to push Hillsong United's "Tell the World". Votes for both were rejected because they received little, if any, attention in the previous years, and Toering said "The Top 2000 is not a plaything of any interest group whatsoever."[11]
2010s
Beginning in 2010, the broadcast was held at the Top 2000 Café in Hilversum.[12] That year, the Eindhovens Dagblad published an investigation alleging that dozens of songs in had incorrect placements or inaccurately did not make the Top 2000.[13] In 2021, Toering admitted that during the early years of the list, if the vote counts were the same, long songs were deliberately moved to play late in the night and that every hour had to start with an 'upbeat' song as per Dutch radio laws. Toering claimed that "After a couple of years, we stopped doing that. The popularity of the Top 2000 was already so great that the order of records had no influence on listening behavior at all."[14]
In 2011, Dutch astronaut André Kuipers opened the broadcast by announcing No. 2000 from the International Space Station at noon on Christmas.[15] Radio 2 said that a record number of 11.2 million people, or 78% of the Dutch population aged 10 and older, listened to the Top 2000 that year.[16]
The live broadcasting in 2018
Beginning in 2018, there were social media campaigns to fix the skewed gender ratio in the Top 2000.[17] This cause gained further attention again in 2023, because only 19% of the total list was female, including just 6% of the top 100. The highest song by a female singer was Miss Montreal's "Door De Wind" at 38th.[18]
In all editions until 2019, The Beatles consistently occupied the most spots in the list, but that year, Queen took over the role as the Top 2000's main supplier with 37 songs.[19]
2020s
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Top 2000 Café was closed to visitors in 2020 and 2021 before reopening to the public in 2022.[20][21]
Beginning in 2020, the broadcast began earlier than ever, starting at midnight on Christmas, to allow for the playing of more longer album versions in place of their shortened radio edits.[22]
In 2023, the entire top 10 remained in the same position as the year before, for the first time.[23] In honor of the list's 25th anniversary in 2023, the songs which ranked 2,001 to 2,500 were also published as De Extra 500 and broadcast on NPO Radio 2 from 11 to 15 December.[24][25]
Voting
Top 2000 sign at the Beeld en Geluid Museum, Hilversum
During the six-to-seven day broadcast, the station broadcasts a set of 2,000 songs that have been voted on by the show's audience through the Internet to be the "most popular songs of all time". The first year of voting was limited to a set list of 2000 songs that the users ranked themselves. Radio 2 changed the format in 2005 to allow voters to nominate their own suggestions.[26] In 2008, Radio 2 used a different voting format: the votes from the previous nine years were compiled to create a "jubilee list" for the tenth anniversary of the radio show.[27]
People can choose as few as five to as many as 35 songs. The voting period lasts one week, starting late November or early December. People can vote through the radio channel's website on any Internet device during this period. Hosts of the radio channel tour the Netherlands in a bus (Dutch: stembus, which means 'ballot box', but literally translates to 'voting bus') during the period of voting to promote the show. People who visit the bus can also submit their songs there.[28][29] People living in other countries can also vote for the Top 2000.[30]
Voters can choose which version of a certain song they prefer. These include covers, live performances or full versions whose running time exceed mainstream radio standards. The eventual lineup of the program can contain multiple versions of one song. The longest song to have aired on the Top 2000 is "Echoes" by Pink Floyd, at 23 minutes and 31 seconds.[31]
For listeners to know if or when their favourite songs get aired, the running order, which includes the date and time songs are set to air, is revealed at least a week prior to the start of the show's broadcast. Since the show is aired all day and night, it is not uncommon for some people to set their alarms to listen to certain songs on the show.[32]
Top 2000 Café
The Top 2000 Café in 2018
Beginning in 2010, the Top 2000 Café is built annually in November and early December at the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision in Hilversum. In the first year, the museum already broke its daily visitor record when over 2,500 people attended on the Thursday of the broadcast, which was more than the 2007 opening of the audiovisual archive.[33]
The Top 2000 broadcast initially began at midnight of Boxing Day. From 2009 to 2015, the show started at noon on 25 December, Christmas Day.[34] From 2015 to 2018, it began at 9:00, moved to 8:00 in 2019 and then ultimately to midnight on Christmas in 2020.
Visitors can enter the Top 2000 Café while the list is being broadcast, and tickets to visit go on sale before the list is released so that those in attendance will not know which songs will be played during their time slot. As a result of the show's popularity, a ticket gives visitors access to the Top 2000 Café for just a 50-minute time slot. The café is quickly cleaned in the ten minutes between time slots.[35]
There is room in the café for 150 people in each time slot. In recent years, tickets can only be bought online and not at the door.[36] Prior to this, there were long queues at the Media Park to purchase them.[35] The tickets are known to be difficult to acquire; for example, in 2024, all 25,200 tickets for the Top 2000 Café sold out in less than an hour.[37]
Notable occurrences
"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen has traditionally been voted the most popular song on the countdown,[38] with Boudewijn de Groot's "Avond" achieving the top spot in 2005 (as the first Dutch and currently only Dutch-language song to do so) and the Eagles' "Hotel California" doing the same in 2010 and 2014.[39] "Roller Coaster" by Dutch singer Danny Vera surprisingly ended up on the #1 spot for the 2020 edition, after having been the highest debuting song of all time the previous year at #4.[40]
The song with the highest position in its debut year in the list (from 2000 onwards) is "Roller Coaster", from Dutch country singer Danny Vera in 2019, entering in fourth place.[41][42] The highest-scoring foreign newcomer was Adele with "Someone Like You" in 2011, placing sixth.[43]
Some songs enter or get a higher placement because of certain events. On 27 November 2015, it was announced that John Lennon's song "Imagine" was voted number one for the first time, in association with the piano act of Davide Martello after the November 2015 Paris attacks.[44] In 2019, farmers across the Netherlands protested against regulations limiting nitrogen emissions. In support of those farmers, a farmers' alliance called people on social media to vote for "De boer dat is de keerl" (English: The Farmer, That's The Man) of the Dutch band Normaal. This resulted in the song entering the list that year in ninth place.[45] In 2021, "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum jumped up 150 spots to number three after the murder of crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, who listed the song as his favourite and had it played at his funeral.[46] In 2024, "Better Days" by Dermot Kennedy debuted at number six because it was a meaningful song to Eva Hermans-Kroot, a Dutch blogger who died of lung cancer during the voting week.[47]
Current events have also caused songs to drop on the list. In 2021, rumors about Marco Borsato's inappropriate behavior led to four of his songs falling off the list entirely.[48] In 2022, Borsato was officially accused of sexual assault, and his songs all dropped by an average of 375 spots.[49]
Social media are also used by voters to get a song into the list of all lists. A notable example is the Pokémon Theme, which entered the chart in 2015 after a successful Facebook campaign and has remained on the chart since.[50][51]
In 2002, the television show Top 2000 a Go-go was introduced to supplement the radio programme.[52] The show contains quizzes, live performances and clips of various songs on the list, as well as interviews with performers and artists featured in the all-time charts. The following year they added Top 2000 in Concert, where various Dutch artists are invited to sing one of their favorite songs, along with one of their own songs.[53] The concert is typically broadcast on New Year's Eve, right after the end of Top 2000. In 2019, Radio 2 DJs released a book about the Top 2000 to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, which was accompanied by a vinyl record.[54]
Other public and commercial radio stations in the Netherlands often have their own take on the end-of-year countdown lists,[55][56] and similar events have been held by radio stations abroad.[57]
Snob 2000
Beginning in 2012, an alternative version of the Top 2000, the "Snob 2000", was created by writers of the Dutch music blog Ondergewaardeerde Liedjes (English: "Often Overlooked Songs"). Each year, the Snob 2000 receives between 60,000 to 75,000 votes.[58] Only songs that are not currently on the formal Top 2000 list are eligible for the Snob 2000. In 2016, the full list was broadcast live on NPO 3FM KX, and since 2017, it airs live on Pinguin Radio.[59][60] Co-founder Freek Janssen said, "The Snob 2000 started as a kind of joke. The Top 2000 drop-down list was far from complete at the time. For example, there was a lot to choose from the 70s and 80s, but more recent 'classics' were missing. Artists such as Queens of the Stone Age, Daft Punk and Arctic Monkeys were not even represented in the drop-down list at all. Radio 2 has now made a catch-up, because hundreds of songs have now made the switch to the Top 2000."[61]
Serious Request–another annual Dutch radio marathon in the month of December that reaches over half the population.
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