Blog · Top 2000
Out of hand: my own Top 2000 site
Ever started a small job thinking: I’ll just do this quickly? Then you know how this blog begins.
In my previous blog I told you how I found out that you can look up online, almost in real time, what Dutch radio stations are playing. All I wanted to know was when Chris Rea would be driving home through the speakers again this year. That became a radio statistics page. That was already not exactly “quick”, but at least it stopped somewhere.
Then I looked at the calendar. It was November. And in November the Top 2000 comes into view. If you already know how to follow the radio live, what do you do? Exactly.
Where it started
It started small: a page on my own site, meant to count down to the start of the Top 2000, with a few facts around it. Soon I realised what was bothering me. At NPO Radio 2 you mostly see what is playing. What you miss is the story around it. How often was this song in the list? Who presented which year? What is never in it? That could all be a lot more fun, I thought. So I ordered a domain of my own: top2000feitjes.nl (“feitjes” means little facts). A place of its own, no longer a corner of my personal site.
There is a second thought behind it, and I will share it with you. For me this site is also a bit of a digital portfolio for TheJumpingFox.nl. This is how I build, how I think about details, and what it looks like when I stay at it too long.
The numbers first
For facts you need data. So I collected the lists of all 27 editions, from 1999 up to and including 2025. A volunteer, Erwin Groenhof, keeps them in an Excel file, and that was my starting point. Together that is 54,000 entries (27 times 2,000), good for 4,925 different songs by 2,310 artists. The 28th list is added in December.
A list of 54,000 rows is not something you just trust. So I checked it against a second source. The top 100 and the bottom 100 of every year matched position by position. I even found a mistake on another website, where two songs had swapped places. That gave me a small feeling of victory, I admit.
What is on it now
From “a few facts” a whole site has grown. A selection:
- A news ticker with 124 remarkable facts, each with a source.
- Pages about the history of the list, the 55 presenters over the years, and how many people listen.
- A quiz, an All Star page and a page with strange lyrics (“Wat zingen ze nou?!”, Dutch for “What are they singing?!”).
- A freely usable photo, with credit, of 1,582 of the 2,310 artists.
- A search that looks through everything, and an English version.
Neon, and eight switches
The site is neon by default: purple, pink and cyan, because that just suits radio better. Don’t like it? Switch it off and you get the brown The Jumping Fox theme back.
At the top right there is a cog with eight settings: the theme, the countdown, the ticker, the equalizer, the player in colour, the radio window that stays detached, smart connection recovery and Party mode. That last one is meant for the top 10 and number 1: confetti, lasers and balloons. I will not say more.
The basics were not forgotten either. Google PageSpeed Insights gives the site 100 on mobile for performance, 100 for accessibility, 100 for best practices and 100 for SEO. The new “agentic browsing” test (how well AI agents can use the page) scores 2 out of 2. That is no coincidence, I spent a few evenings on it.
The Kelderklasse: the Nul-notering
The Top 2000 has almost 5,000 different songs. But what is never in it? That is the Kelderklasse (“cellar class”): over 4 million songs by over 50,000 artists that never made the list in 27 editions. They get the honorary title Nul-notering (zero entries). The name is a nod to the lowest class of Dutch amateur football: whoever is here never played in the top division.
Where do you get such a mountain of songs? From MusicBrainz, a freely accessible music database maintained by volunteers, supplemented with Wikidata and Wikipedia. I did apply a selection, otherwise I would have ended up with a list you can’t do anything with:
- Only artists with a page in at least 3 languages on Wikipedia.
- Only albums and singles from 1950. No live recordings, no remixes and no compilations.
- No classical music, and a number of regions (such as Asia and Eastern Europe) deliberately left out.
- Dutch artists with a Wikipedia page somewhere always stay in.
Search for your favourite artist and you know whether they ever played along. Of the artists in the database, 1,694 are also in the Top 2000. For them you only see the songs that never made the list.
The radio itself, and the live video
My own favourite is the live part. On the site you see what is playing right now, with the last 30 songs below it. Open a song and a card appears with everything I know about it: best position, how often, in which years. You can let the radio play in a floating window while you look around.
And you can watch. The Top 2000 is broadcast from the Top 2000 Café at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid), and NPO Radio 2 puts a camera there. That footage now also appears in a window of its own on my site, next to the radio. It is less simple than it sounds: the footage is a stream you cannot just open. My server asks NPO for the address every time, exactly like their own site does, and my site plays it in a player of its own. I also make sure radio and video do not get in each other’s way: switch the video on while the radio is playing and the video takes over the sound. With “Watch live” in the menu everything is set up in one go: video on the left, radio on the right. It only works on a computer or iPad, because on a phone the window is too small.
Note: the radio, the footage and the logo belong to NPO. I only show them the way they are also shown on their own site, and link to their pages.
Straight to Apple Music and Spotify
When you hear a song, you often want to listen to it right away. So every song has two buttons: Apple Music and Spotify. A search link is quickly made, but on some devices it opens an empty screen in the app. I wanted direct links, straight to the song.
So I looked up all 4,925 songs one by one through Apple’s search service, in three rounds: first the regular search, then a broader one for the difficult cases, and finally via the artist. With some songs the original disappears among the cover versions, for example by a string quartet. I excluded live versions. The result: 4,835 of the 4,925 songs (98.2 percent) now have a direct Apple Music link. The other 90 are mostly obscure songs or titles with an unusual spelling. For Spotify I am searching now, and the direct links will follow soon. It goes at roughly 20 songs per minute, so that takes a few hours.
What happens next
The Top 2000 only starts on 25 December, so I have some time left. My list holds a pile of plans. This year’s list has to be added as soon as it is announced. “Previously played” is going to get smarter. And I am already thinking out loud about an app. Whether that ever happens depends on how much Chris Rea I can still take.
Feel free to look around at top2000feitjes.nl. Found a mistake, or missing something? A visitor already emailed me about a mistake in my text about the history. It has been corrected, with the different sources added. That is how a site should grow.
Stay safe,
Pim