Is it as universal a song subject as love, as timeless as dancing or partying, as relatable as heartbreak or misery or anger? Not quite — but for the actual recording artists behind the songs, it’s the one topic that they’re pretty much guaranteed to have a surfeit of experience in, the one that they can be trusted as an authority on to at least some degree: the music industry itself.
For as long as the music industry has existed, artists have been writing, recording and performing songs about the business that birthed them. Some of them are explicitly biographical, some of them written more in abstract. Some of them offer direct commentary, some of them just present the facts (as the artist sees them) and lets the listener come to their own conclusions. Some of them are highly critical and pissed off about the state of things, some of them… well, we wouldn’t say we can name a ton of songs that are all about how swell things currently are in the music biz — at least that aren’t being bitterly sarcastic about it — but there are some that are less explicitly fire-and-brimstone, anyway.
And as a staff of writers and editors who spend our lives covering all the happenings of the music industry, we have to admit that these songs hold a somewhat special place in our hearts (particularly the ones that mention Billboard by name, natch). We might not share the exact experiences of the artists themselves — sometimes we may even come from the exact other side of their experience — but we’ve seen enough of the business to at least know and understand what they’re talking about, and often to be able to lend a sympathetic ear to their plight. And if the song happens to be a jam even apart from its insider insight, even better, of course.
Here are the Billboard staff’s picks for the 100 greatest songs ever written about the music industry, ranging from classic rock staples to ’90s hip-hop cautionary tales to pop club-slayers from this very year. Some of them tell entire stories about the industry, some of them only memorably glance at in passing, some are told wholly in allegory — but all of them leave you just a little bit wiser and a little more understanding about this thing of ours.
