5. Harry Styles, ‘As It Was.’
Joseph Okpako/WireImage
Google’s fifth-most popular song of the year, according to Google, was Harry Styles’ “As It Was,” a buoyant synth-pop hit that dropped in April and served as the lead single to the British star’s third solo album, “Harry’s House.”
The song went mega-viral, racking up over 1.7 billion plays on Spotify and sitting at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 15 weeks, which was longer than any British music act had ever managed before, according to Billboard.
The track’s music video has almost 400 million views on YouTube and features Styles performing choreography and walking along a revolving platform with the dancer Mathilde Lin.
The song also dominated TikTok this year, soundtracking at least 2.6 million videos. It sparked a huge trend with over 3.7 billion cumulative views where people would post nostalgic before-and-after pictures and videos in sync with Styles saying, “You know it’s not the same, as it was,” comparing memories from a year ago or pre-pandemic to their lives now in 2022.
SiriusXM’s Mikey Piff told Styles about the trend during an interview in May, and the musician said he hadn’t heard of it but that he was going to search for it.
As tends to happen with songs this popular, there was a flurry of other types of videos using it too, like clips featuring cute pets performing different lyrics. One of the most popular videos shows a creator building a house in the game “The Sims.”
Recently, the song kicked off another craze where people used a sped-up version of the song to recap their 2022, often with a fast-paced montage of different months or pictures from the year.
