Have There Been Any Standards Released in the Last 25 Years?

I spent too much time trying to find out

Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher. I wanted to remind everyone reading that when I send out my Thursday newsletter (i.e., today’s newsletter), I recommend two songs at the end: a new one (i.e., released in the last six weeks) and an old one (i.e.,’ released at least five years ago). All of those new and old songs are housed on two playlists you can find at these links: New Ones and Old Ones. Now, let’s turn to today’s topic: standards.

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Searching for Modern Standards

By Chris Dalla Riva

In 2019, Rolling Stone journalist David Browne declared the Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” was now a “modern standard.” The term “standard” often gets thrown around in music, but what does it mean? In Browne’s piece, it means that the song has been covered a lot. In fact, 459 artists have covered “Make You Feel My Love,” the most famous rendition being by Adele.

While I agree that counting the times a song has been covered is a good way to identify a standard, I think that methodology partially obscures what a standard is. Historically, standards are songs that artists within a particular genre are expected to know how to perform, or at least fake their way through. “Johnny B. Goode” is a rock n’ roll standard. “Take the A Train” is a jazz standard. “Mannish Boy” is a blues standard.

There are one of two reasons that musicians are expected to know these songs. First, audiences like to hear them. If you want to make money as a musician, you’ve got to know what gets the people on their feet. Second, other musicians like to play them, often because they think they are good. Because of these two reasons, songs that have historically become known as standards are covered a bunch of times by prominent artists.

For example, the standard “Summertime” has been recorded by Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, among many others. If that many legends record a song, it’s probably a standard. Thus, finding standards is easy. As David Browne noted in his piece about “Make You Feel Me Love,” just count the songs with the most covers.

“Make You Feel My Love” is an outlier, though. Covers are not as common as they once were, especially on the pop charts. As you can see in the chart above, no cover has topped the Billboard Hot 100 since 2001. Still, that Rolling Stone article got me thinking about what songs released since 2000 would constitute a standard. Without covers from prominent artists to rely on, I came up with some other clever ways to identify these songs.

Standards Based on What Music Students are Learning

If a standard is a song that musicians like to play, then a good way to gauge emerging standards is to look at websites where people learn music. For the last few decades, the top destination for online music learning has been Ultimate-Guitar. Their all-time song charts give us some insight into newer songs joining the canon of standards.

A few things might jump out if you look over this data. First, it is heavily focused on songs featuring the guitar, an instrument that hasn’t been at the forefront of popular music over the last two decades. Second, many of these songs were huge hits. Are standards just the most popular songs over a long enough period?

I don’t think so. As noted, standards aren’t just defined by what listeners want to hear. They’re also defined by what musicians want to play. For example, this list makes clear that aspiring musicians want to learn “The Only Exception” by Paramore. The 2,248th most listened to song on Spotify, “The Only Exception” probably wouldn’t come to mind when thinking of the most popular songs of the 21st century. Furthermore, “Airplane” by the Plain White T’s makes this list. That song doesn’t even have 2 million streams on Spotify. Still, you could argue that both of those songs are modern standards.

Standards Based on What Artists are Covering

Though we can’t rely on the pop charts to find what artists are covering, we can still look for covers of songs in other places. For example, YouTube is filled with covers of songs. In fact, if you search for almost any song on YouTube, you’re bound to get a few covers. While I couldn’t get access to YouTube data, I could use SecondHandSongs, a website seeking to build “the most comprehensive source of cover song information.”

When looking at the most covered compositions according to SecondHandSongs, we see some overlap with Ultimate-Guitar. “Someone Like You” by Adele, for example, is on both lists. But there are also differences. While both lists feature their fair share of somber works, this list has some more upbeat songs, like Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army,” and Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” In other words, modern standards are not limited to acoustic ballads.

Standards Based on What Listeners are Adding to Playlists

When identifying standards based on what songs musicians are learning and which songs musicians are covering, we are assuming that standards are only defined by what artists want to play. As noted at the beginning of this piece, that’s one part of the equation. It also matters what listeners want to hear.

To account for this, I came up with one more metric to find standards. I grabbed the first 1,000 playlists that appeared when you search for “cover” on Spotify and found the songs with the most unique covers. To illustrate what that means with an example, I found 92 different covers of Rihanna’s “Stay” across those playlists.

To end up in this list, you not only had to have many artists cover your song, but you had to have listeners adding those covers to playlists. Again, we see some overlap with the other methodologies, along with a preponderance of slower songs, but we also have some new, upbeat additions, like “As It Was” by Harry Styles and “Blinding Lights” by The Weekend. That said, I think the most interesting addition from this methodology is Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” Released in 2020, it’s the newest song on any of these lists.

So, What’s the Ultimate 21st Century Standard?

Since each of these methodologies speaks to a slightly different quality of a musical standard, I thought the best way to identify the ultimate 21st standard was to see which songs ended up in the top 20 of each list. There were seven. I list them alphabetically with the artist who performed the original version.

• “All of Me” - John Legend

• “Perfect” - Ed Sheeran

• “The Scientist” - Coldplay

• “Shallow” - Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper

• “Thinking Out Loud” - Ed Sheeran

• “Viva la Vida” - Coldplay

• “Yellow” - Coldplay

If this exercise has made one thing clear, it’s that even if you detest the respective music of Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, they are likely writing more contemporary standards than anyone else around. I tip my cap to them.

A New One
"stick" by Jim Legxacy
2025 - Alternative Hip-Hop

Given that it’s basically impossible to find a new song that’s already been covered, I figured I’d just recommend a song that I hope someone covers at some point. Recently named one of the 25 artists representing the future of music by Rolling Stone, Jim Legxacy is an omnivorous rapper based in the United Kingdom. His latest song “stick” kind of makes me want to cry. But in a good way. I hope it does the same for you.

An Old One
"Doin' Time" by Lana Del Rey
2019 - Trip Hop

Earlier, I mentioned the Gershwin composition “Summertime.” According to SecondHandSongs, it’s the most covered song of all-time. It’s hard to overstate the influence of this song. But I think one illustration of its legacy is how Sublime brought it new life when they interpolated elements of the song on the 1996 classic “Doin' Time.” 23 years later, Lana Del Rey would then faithfully cover the song in her moody style. Long live Gershwin!

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