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What are the 50 most iconic Beatles songs?

24 March 2025
6.37pm

FabFour125

A Beginning

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3 May 2024

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As someone with autism/ADHD/OCD, I love listing my favorite musician’s most well known songs and making a setlist out of it. It just helps me relax and remove all of my stress. However, there are three musicians I am having some trouble with, because they have SO MANY hit songs that its hard to narrow them down. And one of them is the Beatles.

Unlike the others, all of the data for the Beatles’ hits (Spotify, YouTube, setlist.fm, Billboard, chartmasters, single sales, album sales, cultural significance, etc.) is inconsistent. For example, take Spotify stats from kworb.net., The Fool On The Hill is like 89 most played, but is one of the most covered Beatles songs ever by far (14th on secondhandsongs.com). And that’s just one song.

So I want to make a definitive list aggregating and taking into account all of the aforementioned data but I don’t think of capable of doing it alone. So I want to ask the help of the dedicated fans on this forum. And I chose 50 songs because it’s a nice big even number, and I needed to limit it to one set amount. So what are the 50 most famous Beatles songs?

24 March 2025
11.02pm

sir walter raleigh

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This is an interesting exercise, because like you said Fool On the Hill doesn't have very impressive numbers on Spotify, but is very frequently covered. There are so many objective metrics from so many different ages that you could use to rank them. I think the best way would be through tiers.

Im busy right now so I will fill this out with songs later, but I think the tiers would look something like this.

Ubiquitous Classics

Undisputed Masterpieces

In My Life

A Day In The Life

Strawberry Fields Forever

Something

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

I Am The Walrus

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

Eleanor Rigby

Mega Hits

I Saw Her Standing There

Love Me Do

Twist And Shout

All My Loving

I Want To Hold Your Hand

Help !

Ob La Di (don't know the name for this tier but it is basically enormously popular songs that for one reason or another aren't universally known or loved.)

Ob La Di Ob La Da

Hello Goodbye

With A Little Help From My Friends

Octopus Garden

Maxwell's Silver Hammer

Big Singles and Beloved album tracks.

Please Please Me

From Me To You

I Feel Fine

You've Got To Hide Your Love Away

We Can Work It Out

Paperback Writer

Sgt Pepper 's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Lady Madonna

The Long And Winding Road

Revolution

Helter Skelter

Across The Universe

----- This is 50. Im gonna keep filling out the tiers.

She Loves You

Day Tripper

Drive My Car

The Ballad Of John And Yoko

Ive Just Seen A Face

Cult classics

- endless list if Im not capped at 50 the fun really starts here

These would be my tiers, Im gonna try to try to fill out later today.

Edit: im slowly filling it out, I did the first few tiers and am at 39 songs. Gonna be hard to make cuts going forward because most of my favorite songs are in these last 2 tiers. let me know if you disagree with the tier selection, order, and songs chosen.

Edit 2 - Im up to 50 and I feel like I got there pretty easily. Monstrous catalog, its a joke.

The following people thank sir walter raleigh for this post:

sigh butterfly, Rube

"The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles!"

-Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

"We could ride and surf together while our love would grow"

-Brian Wilson, Surfer Girl

25 March 2025
5.34am

sigh butterfly

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Rishikesh

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I like what you did there Sir! For grins, here are the Top 50 songs from each of the 3 Forum Polls. Perhaps our resident statistician @Jules can help us make sense of all this data. Btw- even though a core of 20 forum members participated in all 3 polls, the #1 song is different in each one. Also, I believe we were allowed to vote for the AB Medley as well as each separate element. @Ahhh Girl may be able to confirm this.