Songs per Year
Number of songs in the corpus per year and per archive. The bars show the total count for each year, coloured by archive. Click the chips below to show or hide individual archives.
Linguistic Insights
Recent growth is rap-driven
The corpus expands sharply from the 1990s on, and from the mid-2000s annual counts are dominated by Deutschrap — not only in its dedicated archive but also within Chart Songs, mirroring the commercial expansion of German-language rap and its takeover of the charts (see Genres per Year →). This shift in composition is worth bearing in mind when reading any corpus-wide trend over time.
Thematic archives mark specific eras
Two large thematic archives leave sharp temporal imprints: the GDR archive is confined to the years before 1990, a block of East German popular music, while the NDW archive peaks in the early 1980s with the commercial height of Neue Deutsche Welle. Artist archives such as Udo Lindenberg and Konstantin Wecker instead span decades, adding a steady background. Because archive coverage is uneven across years, year-level comparisons mix genuine change with shifts in what was recorded.
Number of songs per year · stacked by archive · click chips to toggle archives
These analyses are based on corpus data as of July 29, 2026.