Billboard Publish Top 50 "Love" Songs

Billboard has published their take on the top 50 love songs of the last 55 years, but with a twist.

Lionel Richie SXSW 2012 - Photo By Ros O'Gorman

The song couldn’t just be about love. It actually had to have the word (or a form of the word) “love” in the title to qualify for the list.

While this may seem limiting at first, there were literally thousands of candidates that had charted on the Hot 100 that used that very favorite of words. Billboard took all their chart performances, analyzed the numbers, and came up with the very biggest.

Topping the list is Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s Endless Love, a song that you could not get away from during the summer of 1981. It stayed at number 1 for nine weeks and lingered on the charts much longer.

Endless Love is followed by Boyz II Men’s I’ll Make Love to You and Rihanna Featuring Calvin Harris’ We Found Love, both which stayed number 1 longer (14 and 10 weeks respectively) but had less spectacular chart runs, overall, adjusted for the era.

What makes this list interesting is that, even though a song has “love” in the title, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a “love song.” Some are about love lost. Some are about respect (To Sir With Love) and one, Sara Bareilles’ Love Song (#50) is a rebuke of record executives and their demands for a specific type of material from an artist.

Here is the top ten followed by all songs by veteran artists that made the lower portion of the chart. To see and hear all of the songs, go to Billboard.