Our Annual Report concludes with our biggest list — the 200 (!!!) Best Songs of 2023. Make sure to also see our list of the 50 Best Albums of the Year, and check out our complete recap of the best music, film, and TV of 2023 with awards, lists, and interviews all in one place here.
Boy, 2023 sure was a year! A year among years that — OK, now that the casuals have kept scrolling, let’s talk real shit: Let’s talk about the music industry, where Consequence is heading, and why we wanted to write about 200 songs.
By now you know the deal with music media: fewer outlets, fewer jobs for critics, less coverage, and more new music each Friday than any listener can hear in a week. At the same time, readership for reviews has fallen across the industry. If you’ve paid close attention to Consequence in recent years, you’ve probably seen some of our attempts to navigate this uncertain terrain, like the Songs of the Week roundup or the monthly Staff Picks of best albums, which have allowed us to sustainably analyze a lot more new music.
These changes were public, but Consequence has also been evolving behind the scenes. Our senior editors changed a lot over the last three years, and so did our structure. Consequence of Sound became Consequence. We reinvented ourselves to become more collaborative: fewer top-down editorial decisions, more input from a growing team of staff writers and editors. Some readers might recognize their names: Eddie Fu, Abby Jones, Jonah Krueger, Liz Shannon Miller, Sun Noor, Paolo Ragusa, and Mary Siroky. Their passion made a 200-song list possible.
Consequence will continue to grow, but some things never change. Our publisher is still Alex Young, who started the company in his dorm room in 2007. And we still fucking love music. In 2023, as the shape of our staff came into focus, we ramped up our new music coverage for the first time in years. This list is part of that growth — it used to be 50 songs, and now it’s 200. We wish we could write a full article about every single track, and maybe someday the industry will support that. For now, during the biggest abundance of great music in all of human history, we’re so grateful for the opportunity to celebrate our picks for the 200 best songs of 2023.
— Wren Graves
Features Editor