The 100 Most Lost Songs of the 1990s

Many of the Top 40 hits of the early 1990s disappeared from the radio relatively quickly. By 1992-93, Top 40 radio was in free-fall. Those stations still in the format were trying to distance itself from the “rhythmic pop” of a few years earlier, whether New Kids on the Block or Milli Vanilli, but there also weren’t that many stations still left in the format, so it didn’t much matter what was in the gold library.

The late ‘90s were different. Top 40 rebounded, driven by the same type of teen acts who were blamed for tanking the format a decade earlier. The handful of all-‘90s or ‘90s-driven stations that have emerged in the last few years found many of their signature songs in the time between 1997 and 1999. 

I first turned my “Lost Factor” calculations to the early ‘90s (1990-94) in June 2020. It took me until early January of this year to do the same for 1995-99. Those calculations were complicated by the number of hit songs not released as commercial singles (and thus not charting) in the mid-‘90s, as well as by a minor technical change in the way BDSradio reported its airplay figures, which resulted in me redoing my 1995 data.

By the time I calculated the “Lost Factor” for the hits of the late ‘90s, there were a lot more places to hear the ‘90s on the radio—not just all-‘90s stations but some songs at Classic/Adult Hits and Hot AC as well.  Despite the ‘90s resurgence, the split between songs from the first half of the decade and the last in our 100 Most Lost Songs of the 1990s is nearly equal—53% from 1990-94, 47% from 1995-99.

Of those hundred songs:

• 27% can be classified as “rhythmic pop”—the often-producer-driven acts of the early ‘90s whose hits often began at “Rhythmic Top 40” stations and radiated to both Top 40 and R&B stations.
• 21% are from acts established in the late ‘70s and ‘80s who were still able to have chart hits of some magnitude based on their track record. Elton John’s outlier “Candle in the Wind 1997” tops the chart, but his more typical “The One” is here also. So are Madonna, Richard Marx, Phil Collins/Genesis, and Meat Loaf.
• 19% are from teen acts—a constant throughout the decades for “Lost Factor.” Backstreet may be back alright at radio, but 98 Degrees, Five, and Immature are not. Most of the teen acts are in the boy band mold, but I also included pop acts like Jamie Walters, and went back to do my calculations after realizing I’d left out LeAnn Rimes.
• 15% are Hip-Hop, including some late ‘90s titles that were driven on the Billboard Hot 100 largely by sales and airplay at Hip-Hop and Rhythmic Top 40 radio from Master P to Busta Rhymes.

To calculate the “Lost Factor,” songs are awarded points based on where they placed on Billboard’s year-end Top 100, which are then divided by the number of weekly spins monitored by BDSradio. Here are the hundred songs from 1990-99 with the highest “Lost Factor.”

Throughout the last two years of “Lost Factor” calculations, we’ve also been looking at those songs that overperform their chart performance at the time. For 1990-99, those numbers are harder to derive because many of those songs weren’t commercial singles at the time, and thus not found on the year-end charts.

The songs that overperform from the ‘60s through the ‘80s have tended to be those pop/rock songs supported now by both Classic Rock and the Classic Hits format formerly known as Oldies. Our top five overperformers—again, a very partial list when songs like “When I Come Around” or the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly” can’t be included—are a more varied bunch:

• Goo Goo Dolls, “Iris”—the most typical of the group;
• Brandy, “I Wanna Be Down”—now living mostly at Adult R&B radio;
• Hootie & the Blowfish, “I Only Wanna Be With You”—played at AC and Classic Hits;
• George Strait, “Write This Down”—never a Top 40 hit, but one of his latter-career hits most likely to be found in a Country station’s gold library;
• Haddaway, “What is Love”—the most enduring of the early-to-mid-‘90s Eurodance hits; a signature record for the ‘90s format, but also with pockets of airplay at AC and Classic Hits.

We’ve calculated “Lost Factor” between 1960 and 1999 now. That means we’ll be back soon with the all-time Top 100 covering all those years. Here are all our other Lost Factor articles to date.