The greatest decade for movie soundtracks, according to science
Ask yourself a question: what’s the last song that you can remember that was inextricably linked to a film?
It used to be the case with movie soundtracks all the time that a popular film would spawn a popular song that was endlessly on the radio. Think back to the 1990s, for instance, when there was Wet Wet Wet and Four Weddings and a Funeral, Celine Dion and Titanic, and Bryan Adams and Robin Hood.
Having lived through each of those I can tell you that they seemed to be number one on the charts for several years at a time, along with Whitney Houston’s cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’ from The Bodyguard starring Kevin Costner, and each of them would be on every stereo whenever and wherever you turned it on, a repeating audio horror from which you could seemingly never escape.
But something happened in the 30 years since; no longer do we associate films with uber-popular pop songs in the same way we did, say, ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing’ by Aerosmith with 1998 sci-fi Armageddon. Instead, it’s more likely to be an instrumental theme that we associate a film with, like Hans Zimmer’s iconic piece for the Interstellar cornfield scene, or Clint Mansell’s haunting ‘Lux Aeterna’ from Requiem for a Dream.
It seems several shifting trends have contributed to this development, according to statsignificant.com, including a huge reduction in the amount of Google searches for ‘movie soundtrack’, which is down from 60million a month in 2004 to less than 20m a month at the start of this year. Plus, it seems that producers are more likely to repurpose older songs for their movies, like the use of Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way’ for 2022’s The Batman, resulting in people searching for individual songs from older decades rather than current songs.
According to science, it was indeed the 1990s that provided the highest number of Billboard chart-topping hits from movies since the ‘60s, with Whitney Houston’s belting nightmare spending the most weeks at number one ever, at 14, and the Boyz II Men effort ‘End of the Road’ from the forgettable Eddie Murphy comedy Boomerang, ringing in a close second place at 13.
Meanwhile, the 1980s saw a big spike in songs synonymous with films, which massive hits like Berlin’s ballad ‘Take My Breath Away’ for Top Gun, Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ from John Hughes’ youth comedy/teenage solidarity film The Breakfast Club and Ray Parker Jr’s ‘Ghostbusters’ for the oft referenced titular film, thereby standing as the decade that produced the most songs ever featured in motion pictures and TV.
The current century has seen some big film tie-in songs this century too, and if we discount Eminem’s 8 Mile, given it starred the rapper in the first place, the most popular have been songs like Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ from the minion heavy Despicable Me 2, ‘See You Again’ by Wiz Khalifa for Furious 7 and Destiny’s Child’s ‘Independent Women Part 1’ for the original Charlie’s Angels.
In terms of TV, the recent Netflix smash Stranger Things has proved what mass streaming can do for a song, even if it’s 40 years old, with the pivotal use of Kate Bush’s 1985 hit ‘Running up that Hill (A Deal with God)’, sending it back to the top of the charts in no fewer than eight countries and garnering it a billion streams on Spotify, leading to the singer releasing her back catalogue on vinyl and making millions in the process.
