Top Songs of 2023: United Kingdom

Apple Music’s end-of-year charts are based on plays between 1 November 2022 and 31 October 2023. In the UK, it would be tempting to rename the past 12 months as “2023 (Taylor’s Version)”. No one appears more times in the nation’s 100 most-played songs on Apple Music than Taylor Swift (five entries). Hers wasn’t a total dominance, though. It’s Miley Cyrus who tops the chart, with “Flowers”, and there’s plenty of homegrown success to toast too. After a long, frustrating wait, 2023 was the year RAYE broke out as an independent artist and released her debut album, My 21st Century Blues, and she celebrates with the scintillating “Escapism.” breaching the Top 3. Link-ups were the order of the day on the dance floor, where drum ’n’ bass continued to be rewired and reshaped via killer collaborations from venbee & goddard. as well as Rudimental, Charlotte Plank and Vibe Chemistry, while the already rapid rise of PinkPantheress hit hyperdrive when she invited Ice Spice onto “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2”. Among UK rap’s biggest hitters, Dave and Central Cee claimed the song of the summer with their collab “Sprinter” spending 10 weeks at No. 1. Britain’s love of Afrobeats keeps flowering too: Rema had hearts on lockdown (oh, lockdown) with the Selena Gomez-featuring “Calm Down”, and Libianca’s “People” was riding high a year after its original release. Revisit the songs the UK listened to most in 2023 on Apple Music—and remember to add the ones you love to your library.