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The best song of all time - now that can be considered a rather rhetorical question! Besides being too broad of a topic, its mostly a personal choice. Yet it can be somewhat measured if there are constraints involved. The "best" of anything is usually a vote of the audience at-large or of choice. But when it comes to music, we tend to look at record/CD sales.

Record sales only tells part of the story. What about songs that were made before the 'record' was invented? Who is to say an old tune such as Handel's "Messiah" (The Hallelujah Chorus) isn't the greatest song of all time? After all, it is a standard song that has been sung since 1742! But are we looking at longevity or popularity? And where do those lines cross anyway?

There can be skewed results if you look at record sales. Not everyone could afford records when they were first created, record sales were often affected by racism, as well as the recording itself, etc etc. "Candle in the Wind" by Elton John sold a whopping 30 million. But this data is from 1998. The song was originally published in 1973, in honor of Marilyn Monroe. The 1997 remake for Princess Diana was released as a single. It was a greater success than the original, reaching number one in many countries. I'm sure the advances in technology, the ability to better measure record sales and the death of a world favorite princess had a lot to do with that. Many artists over the years had large record sales, such as Elvis. He sometimes benefited from racist attitudes of his era. So record sales might not be a very good barometer after all of the 'best song of all time'!

What if we looked at how many times a song has been recorded or sung? In which instance, we could consider "The Star Spangled Banner", our national anthem, to be among one of the greatest, because it is sung at almost every sports game across the country. But it is sung all the time for a reason, not because we like it. So that can't be it either! Ironically, "The Star Spangled Banner" was written to the tune "The Anacreontic Song", a British drinking song. Which means a drinking song is our national anthem. We can't have a drinking song as the best song of all time, can we? Well, stranger things have happened I suppose.

We could always, as I mentioned earlier, put it to the popular vote. But then you'd have different songs for different ages, cultures, nations. The possibilities are endless! Hence the need for measurable constraints! Such a vote could be quite biased, even with

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