1 - Coldplay – “Viva La Vida”

In your hundreds of thousands you have listened to Coldplay's “Viva La Vida” more than three million times, a simply staggering amount for a song that has been around for just a little over six months.

“Viva La Vida” is one of Coldplay's sparsest songs, with Will Champion's drums and Guy Berryman's bass providing a static, metronomic beat around which the church bells and orchestral phrases gather. Piano and guitar effects fly from Johnny Buckland's fingertips throughout the song, sometimes fading in and out of the ears reach but just as often abruptly rolling and crashing into celebratory bursts. It all draws attention to Chris Martin revealing the tormented memoirs of the disgraced 'king' now looking at the broken world around him, revolutionaries waiting to take him down. Perhaps a not-so-coded message to the men responsible for ruling the world now.

Martin told MTV on the album's release that the song “is one of our favorites, because none of us are doing anything on it that we've ever done before”. It is probably that sense of adventure and the urgency of the record that have made Last.fm listeners respond in such an overwhelming way to “Viva La Vida”.