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Final countdown: Admit it. It’s time to retire year-end rankings
We don’t need top 10 lists in 2025. We’re curating our own culture — from Scandipop to BookTok smut — and the gatekeepers can’t keep up
Do you miss Buzzfeed? We do. They practically invented the Listicle – a story told entirely through a list. They made rankings seem fun (#4 Will Blow Your Mind! Can You Handle #8?) But what we really miss is a world simple enough to believe year-end rankings, round-ups and righteous record-keeping.
There used to be a time when Vogue would put out a slideshow of the 10 dresses that defined the year, and we’d believe it. If IMDb said that Jurassic World was the top movie of 2015, we’d tell every paleontologist to shut up about the inaccuracies. We’d quote from books that landed on NYT bestseller lists. People used to memorise which artist landed where on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums. “Many of my greatest inspirations, such as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé, came to me through those lists,” recalls Tamil-American artist Amrithavarshini Muralikrishnan (@TheMusicalDoc).
Now, not so much. Can a music magazine really compete with Every Noise at Once, that rabbit-hole for every subgenre of music known to man? It lets you sample Scandipop, Nigerian hip hop, Kurdish remixes, and vintage French electronica, so why not make up your own rankings? BookTok is giving readers recaps and recommendations every day, pulling apart the snooty literature canon. As for Insta, you need to watch just one Christmas romance movie clip, and the algorithm will bombard you with 25 more – none of which you’d have found otherwise. Even TV show rankings are struggling to stay relevant as we binge Kaos, Korean dramas, Kawaii horror and Kannada thrillers.
Lists used to shape culture. They were shorthand for taste, gatekeepers of prestige. Society pages and glossy magazines created hierarchies of style. They turned PR blitzes into wardrobe essentials. “They used to make people feel they can become more desirable or worthy by dressing like those on the lists,” says fashion designer Ayush Kejriwal (@DesignerAyushKejriwal), 43. “In truth, they are a marketing strategy that fuels self-doubt and subtly controls choices.”
Rankings have lost much of their power in the last decade. Those red-carpet round-ups no longer feel globally representative or rooted in truth when every celebrity is engineering their own viral moment. No one cares which podcast cracked the top 10 this year – they’re mostly dudes talking to other dudes about nothing, anyway. And instead of Song Of The Year, our own Spotify’s Wrapped lists feel more real. Why should Life Of A Showgirl matter to someone who spent 2025 listening to niche ambient tracks from a café in Kyoto and viral remixes they discovered while scrolling half-asleep?
“More than half of the top-earning artists on platforms such as Spotify now come from non-English-speaking countries,” says Muralikrishnan. In the US, “younger listeners curate their own playlists with Spanish, Korean, Tamil or Yoruba tracks”. Rankings can still influence touring opportunities, brand partnerships and sync placements. But for independent artists, being sampled in a viral Reel earns more cred – even if it’s for a short while. Did you discover Rose Betts’s “doodles I’d undoooo” while doomscrolling? Same.
What you bought, watched, wore, heard or read this year is a good indication of how much you heeded the hype; or didn’t. All the PR in the world hasn’t been enough to save Mickey 17, Die My Love, Swag II, and Sydney Sweeney’s jeans.
Surely, the critics are seeing it too. Kanwar Anmol Singh Jamwal, 31, analyses and breaks down films made across the country on his YouTube channel Tried and Refused Productions. He publishes a monthly listicle of underrated films across Indian industries. “People are tired of mediocre work that dominates the mainstream; they now demand substance over scale and the canon,” His reccs are built around the authenticity of the film’s story, its originality, score, cinematography and sound design, and most importantly how it made him feel when he watched it.
And he sits through obscure releases in Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi and more. So, his must-watch lists are more navigation tools than commandments, which is why fans love them. The channel’s subscribers get into heated debates on his best and worst picks of the year. And everyone feels heard – which didn’t happen with the Top 10 decrees of yore.
It’s another reason why we miss Buzzfeed. They’d no doubt have done a Listicle around the 10 kinds of people we hate in the comments section; or 10 signs that a ranking is out of sync with the public. Kejriwal has found another use for them already: “Today these lists work less as strict rules and more as inspiration, giving people starting points to adapt and express their own style.”
From HT Brunch, December 27, 2025
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