Top 2000
The Top 2000 is an annual Dutch marathon radio programme that plays the 2,000 most popular songs listeners have deemed the best of all time. Hosted by the station NPO Radio 2 since 1999, it has since become "an indispensable part of the collective Dutch memory".
The show runs 24 hours a day, starting on Christmas and ending on New Year's Eve, functioning as a countdown to the new year. A significant part of the Netherlands' population listens to the broadcast each year; during the 2023 edition, it had a national radio market share of 41.1 percent. In regard of its popularity and notoriety, the show is often called de lijst der lijsten, the chart of charts.
First held in 1999 to inaugurate the new millennium, the Top 2000 was intended to be a one-time event. It became immensely popular. Following this success, Radio 2 decided to make it an annual programme. The broadcast initially started at midnight on the day after Christmas, and since 2020 it has begun on the midnight of Christmas Day. It continues until midnight of New Year's Eve. The voting period lasts a week, and the full list is revealed prior to the broadcast. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been the number-one voted song in all but five years.
The show is hosted in a temporary studio called the Top 2000 Café at the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision in Hilversum. Visitors are able to purchase a timed ticket to enter the studio. Because of the popularity of the show and the small size of the studio, visitors are only allowed to stay for a limited period of time. The tickets have been known to sell out quickly.
History
The first list
In the summer of 1998, Radio 2 station manager Kees Toering wanted to commemorate the new millennium by presenting a listener-compiled list of the 2000 best songs of the 20th century, aired between Christmas and New Year's Day. In September 1999, he presented this idea to his colleagues, who wanted to beat the listening figures of competitor Sky Radio. However, many of his colleagues were skeptical because the station did not broadcast at night, it seemed unlikely that listeners would tune in during the late hours, and because Sky Radio dominated the market share during Christmas time because of their own special programming. DJ gave a passionate speech which helped convince the critics.The voting process was advertised on Spits, a free newspaper with a circulation of 450,000 distributed mostly amongst public transportation passengers. There was a coupon where one could write ten songs, cut it out and send to the station. It took days to manually record the results, and the top song was Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". The first song ever broadcast was John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" at No. 2000 on the midnight of 26 December 1999. It was originally intended to be a one-time event, but the listening figures were higher than expected and the station decided to continue.
2000s
In 2000, Jeanne Kooijmans became the first female DJ to present the Top 2000, although more women worked behind the scenes. In the early years, the final hours of the broadcast were pre-recorded. Then in 2004, it was broadcast in Almere on the houseboat of DJ. In 2005, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was knocked off the top spot for the first time, replaced by "" by Boudewijn de Groot, after a campaign by Radio 2 DJ. In 2007, there were similar campaigns, one by the regional newspaper Dagblad van het Noorden to push Groningen singer Ede Staal to number one with "'t Het nog nooit zo donker west" and another by Christians on the social media platform Hyves to push Hillsong United's "Tell the World". Votes for both were rejected because they received little, if any, attention in the previous years, and Toering said "The Top 2000 is not a plaything of any interest group whatsoever."In 2009, the Top 2000 began broadcasting 12 hours earlier at noon on Christmas Day.
2010s
Beginning in 2010, the broadcast was held at the Top 2000 Café in Hilversum. That year, the Eindhovens Dagblad published an investigation alleging that dozens of songs in had incorrect placements or inaccurately did not make the Top 2000. In 2021, Toering admitted that during the early years of the list, if the vote counts were the same, long songs were deliberately moved to play late in the night and that every hour had to start with an 'upbeat' song as per Dutch radio laws. Toering claimed that "After a couple of years, we stopped doing that. The popularity of the Top 2000 was already so great that the order of records had no influence on listening behavior at all."In 2011, Dutch astronaut André Kuipers opened the broadcast by announcing No. 2000 from the International Space Station at noon on Christmas. Radio 2 said that a record number of 11.2 million people, or 78% of the Dutch population aged 10 and older, listened to the Top 2000 that year.
In 2017, King Willem-Alexander referenced the Top 2000 in his annual Christmas speech.
In 2018, NPO Radio 2 presented the inaugural "NPO Radio 2 Top 2000 Award", given to the Dutch artist with the highest debuting song in the Top 2000 that year. It would become a yearly tradition. The first award went to Davina Michelle, because her cover of "Duurt te lang" debuted at No. 477.
Beginning in 2018, there were social media campaigns to fix the skewed gender ratio in the Top 2000. This cause gained further attention again in 2023, because only 19% of the total list was female, including just 6% of the top 100. The highest song by a female singer was Miss Montreal's "Door De Wind" at 38th.
In 2019, DJ Rob Stenders made listeners angry by cutting off the song "Wat zou je doen?", by Marco Borsato and Ali B, after just a minute. Stenders was famously not a fan of Borsato's music, but claimed that he did so because of timeslot requirements.
2020s
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Top 2000 Café was closed to visitors in 2020 and 2021 before reopening to the public in 2022.Beginning in 2020, the broadcast began earlier than ever, starting at midnight on Christmas, to allow for the playing of more longer album versions in place of their shortened radio edits.
In 2020, DJ Ruud de Wild was criticized for pronouncing the title of the song "Niggas in Paris" uncensored while presenting. He also said the word "nigga" in other instances around the playing of the song.
In 2023, the entire top 10 remained in the same position as the year before, for the first time. In honor of the list's 25th anniversary in 2023, the songs which ranked 2,001 to 2,500 were also published as De Extra 500 and broadcast on NPO Radio 2 from 11 to 15 December. That year, a record number of 381 songs by Dutch artists made the list.
In 2025, there was a new record of 397 songs on the list made by Dutch artists. The news stories surrounding this edition of the list included Freek Rikkerink 's terminal lung cancer diagnosis, Marco Borsato's acquittal during his child sex abuse trial, the K3 reunion, and the continued popularity of the Beste Zangers reality television program.
Voting
During the six-to-seven day broadcast, the station broadcasts a set of 2,000 songs that have been voted on by the show's audience through the Internet to be the "most popular songs of all time". The first year of voting was limited to a set list of 2000 songs that the users ranked themselves. Radio 2 changed the format in 2005 to allow voters to nominate their own suggestions. In 2008, Radio 2 used a different voting format: the votes from the previous nine years were compiled to create a "jubilee list" for the tenth anniversary of the radio show.People can choose as few as five to as many as 35 songs. The voting period lasts one week, starting late November or early December. People can vote through the radio channel's website on any Internet device during this period. Hosts of the radio channel tour the Netherlands in a bus during the period of voting to promote the show. People who visit the bus can also submit their songs there. People living in other countries can also vote for the Top 2000.
Voters can choose which version of a certain song they prefer. These include covers, live performances or full versions whose running time exceed mainstream radio standards. The eventual lineup of the program can contain multiple versions of one song. The longest song to have aired on the Top 2000 is "Tubular Bells " by Mike Oldfield, at 25 minutes and 30 seconds.
For listeners to know if or when their favourite songs get aired, the running order, which includes the date and time songs are set to air, is revealed at least a week prior to the start of the show's broadcast. Since the show is aired all day and night, it is not uncommon for some people to set their alarms to listen to certain songs on the show.
The Top 2000 broadcast initially began at midnight of Tweede Kerstdag. From 2009 to 2015, the show started at noon on 25 December, Christmas Day. From 2015 to 2018, it began at 9:00, moved to 8:00 in 2019 and then ultimately to midnight on Christmas in 2020.
Top 2000 Café
Beginning in 2010, the Top 2000 Café is built annually in November and early December at the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision in Hilversum. In the first year, the museum already broke its daily visitor record when over 2,500 people attended on the Thursday of the broadcast, which was more than the 2007 opening of the audiovisual archive.Visitors can enter the Top 2000 Café while the list is being broadcast, and tickets to visit go on sale before the list is released so that those in attendance will not know which songs will be played during their time slot. As a result of the show's popularity, a ticket gives visitors access to the Top 2000 Café for just a 50-minute time slot. The café is quickly cleaned in the ten minutes between time slots.
There is room in the café for 150 people in each time slot. In recent years, tickets can only be bought online and not at the door. Prior to this, there were long queues at the Media Park to purchase them. The tickets are known to be difficult to acquire; for example, in 2024, all 25,200 tickets for the Top 2000 Café sold out in less than an hour.