Top Alternative Rock Songs of 2021 (Full Billboard List)

HOLY HELL. This chart is no stranger to bad years. This one is so bad, I almost decided to take a video break. I dub this one the worst year the chart has ever had. At least ten times as bad as 2017 or 2018. Why is it so bad? I don't have the slightest clue. There was some weird brute forcing, sort of payola and sort of not, which you'll see that at the bottom of the list. That's why there are a lot of pop songs and songs with weird runs. But that doesn't really explain the rest of the list. Why did we allow people with the descriptor of "social media personality" to make music, and why did radio actually take the bait? What was with that terrible imitation pop-punk phase? And why are a good amount of these songs just bad? I feel like the years directly surrounding 2021 weren't as bad as this. This video counts down the top songs played on alternative rock (also known as modern rock) radio stations in the United States in 2021, as tracked by Billboard's Modern Rock/Alternative Airplay chart. The card at the beginning of the video shows what is defined as the "chart year". It's a little different from the typical calendar year. The chart year is defined in the Dec 18, 2021 issue of Billboard Magazine, which can be found on the worldradiohistory website. The labels "alternative" and "modern" can mean just about anything in the context of a corporate and ever-changing entity like radio. Think of it as a sort of redundancy, whatever's hot one year might not be played the next year. Whatever radio stations across the country played in large during the year is what's present here. You'll hear a lot of sounds, some of which may not even necessarily relate to rock music. This chart is ranked weekly by the amount of spins accrued each week, from 1-40, 1 having the most spins and 40 having the least. This year-end chart is ranked by the total number of plays a song accrued on alternative radio stations across the United States. This list was compiled throughout the 2021 chart year by AAACharts, whose channel can be found here on YouTube. He compiled the list using publicly-available information supplied by Nielsen BDS, who provided airplay data to Billboard during the 2021 chart year. Because of this, the full lists I'll be posting from 2016 to 2021 will be highly accurate compared to the lists featured in my other videos. PK = peak, or the highest a song got on the weekly ranking in a chart year WKS = weeks, or the amount of time a song spent in weeks in a chart year