A playlist of every "Now That's What I Call Music" compilation

Now That's What I Call Music! is the umbrella title for a series of compilation albums comprising songs already huge hits. Created in 1983 by Virgin Records and launched in the UK and Ireland, the Now! music series eventually spun off to other countries and genre-specific subsets—many of which also went on to become gold—or platinum-selling albums on their own.

Now (see what I did there?), someone has compiled the tracklisting for all 114 volumes of Now That's What I Call Music! and turned them into a single, 4500-plus-song-long Spotify playlist. (Technically, several other albums have been released since this playlist was first compiled in 2023, but I think 114 volumes of pop song hits should be more than enough to suffice for most people.)

Perusing through the Now That's I Call Music! Wikipedia page, I am genuinely surprised at how popular these compilations actually were. I remember seeing the advertisements for them, of course. I was 13 years old in 1998 when the first one was released in the US, which is a prime age for pop music consumption; even if I was a firmly anti-pop-music little pop-punker myself, I was still aware of what was going into all the cool kids' CD players. Even then, I don't think I ever actually saw anyone listen to one of these albums unless they'd received it as a gift from a deeply uncool relative or they themself were deeply uncool and desperate to connect with the culture.

But wow, yeah, these albums were huge sellers! What a stupidly brilliant cash cow from the record labels. It takes a certain kind of genius to think, "Hey, ya know how we already signed exploitative deals with all these musicians, and we're already making bank off of them? What if we take everyone's most popular songs and re-release them all together as a separate album and make even more money?!"

It's an evil genius, for sure, but I suppose a genius nonetheless.