Here's 2013's Top Songs, But Where's Miley?

Earlier today, Spotify released their top songs, artists, and albums of 2013 and things are about as you'd expect other than one huge question: Where the heck is Miley Cyrus? Asking this might sound strange because for the past several months everyone's been asking quite the opposite. "Where isn't Miley Cyrus?" "Why won't Miley Cyrus go away?" "No, seriously, what do we do if she doesn't stop infiltrating the news?" But it's because we've been bombarded with so much Miley that it's hard to understand how she could possibly not make more than one appearance on Spotify's list.

Let's take a closer look. Maybe that'll help make sense of the fact that Miley barely made a mark even though I was forced to hear "We Can't Stop" against my will in multiple convenience stores. To start, Spotify's year end list consists of several categories: Most Streamed Tracks, Most Streamed Artist, Most Streamed Album, Most Viral Track and Artist, and Most Streamed Artist by gender.

There's a lot of repeats here. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis were very popular as were Lorde and The Lumineers. Daft Punk was, of course, also featured and the only surprising thing about that was that "Get Lucky" ranked as the number four most streamed song rather than number one. Miley Cyrus, on the other hand, isn't ranked at all until you get to Most Streamed Female and there she's only number six.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge Miley fan, so my concern is coming from a place of confusion rather than anger. I just don't get how this is possible. Where are the people who hated "Wrecking Ball" but then found themselves listening to it online due to the sudden urge to sing along? I know I'm not the only one. Maybe Spotify users just don't like Miley. "We Can't Stop" has 297 million YouTube views, so maybe people want to see their Miley rather than hear her. She's the one that decided it was a good idea to wear palm tree pasties and twerk, if people want to see the show rather than hear the music, that's no more shocking than any of the crazy-for-the-sake-of-being-crazy things she's done recently. (Smoking weed on stage, anyone?)

What it comes down to is just that we've been tricked into thinking the music is more popular than it is. Yes, Miley's everywhere and her songs are all over the radio. And yes, we talk about her ridiculous performances and gimmicks, but when people really want to listen to music (like, actually listen, not watch a cat lipsync), they don't wanna listen to Miley. At least not as much as you think.

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