“A Horse with No Name,” by America. That was the #1 song on April 3rd, 1972. I know this because I randomly picked that date to test this tip: ask Siri to play the top song from any given date, and you can be as specific as you want. Other quick tests revealed today’s top song as All Mine by Kanye West, and August 10th, 1984 it was “When Doves Cry” by Prince.
Ask Siri to play the top song from any date. And be really specific. Like this.
See what else you can do with your HomePod: https://t.co/9Rovw8pzfI pic.twitter.com/7gXK6p5EqI
— Apple Support (@AppleSupport) June 7, 2018
How to Make Siri Play the Top Song for a Given Date
Be that as it may, here’s how you do it: say, “Hey Siri, play the top song from [date].” You can also say, “Hey Siri, play the #1 song from [date].”
Additional notes for this tip:
- [Update: this feature requires an Apple Music subscription]
- If you ask for the top song for just a year (say, 1972), you’ll get the Top 25 for that year, which is pretty cool.
- If you ask for the #1 song in a year, you’ll get just the one song.
- You can also ask for the top song for a given month in a year, and Siri will play just the #1 song for that month.
- Requests for, say, the #3 song on a given date return the same results as requests for the top song (i.e., Siri currently only knows the #1 song from the charts).
- In my testing, I could get the top songs going back to 1951.
- If you ask Siri what the top song was for a given date, she will tell you what it was without playing it.
- This tip works for any Siri-enabled device.
- As a bonus, if your HomePod is connected to your Apple TV, Siri will put album art on the screen, along with the artist, title, and album she’s pulling the song from (which may not be the same album the song charted with).
- Siri appears to have no idea what the charts looked like from individual dates in 1984, but she does know the top tune (“When Doves Cry”) and the Top 25 from that year. The other years I tried worked just fine.
I love random bits of information. I picked 1972 to start my testing because that year is on the edge of my memories. I remember my older sister playing a lot of FM radio from what I think was 1972 to 1975. Using this tip can be a great way to transport yourself back to a particular moment in time no matter your age.
As John so eloquently put it, you apparently need an Apple Music subscription for this to work. Otherwise, Siri says she doesn’t “have charts for that date” – for any date I tried from the 1950’s through the 2000’s.
Yea this only works if you subscribe to apple’s “we hate your data” craptacular apple music crap service. Siri won’t even answer what the song is unless you pay apple their extortion money, much less something elegant like answer the question and notice you actually have that song in your own unmolested library, and play from there. I mean that would have taken them giving a s***.