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The tracks you can’t get enough of lately, all in one place. Updated as you listen.

The songs you can’t do without. The more you use Apple Music, the more essential they become. Refreshed every Tuesday.

Whether it’s a weekday morning or Saturday night, get going with this personalised set of upbeat music. Refreshed every Monday.

Songs to help you relax and unwind. Updated every Sunday.

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

Following in Sweden's grand tradition of producing cosmically great pop music, duo Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson came together in Halmstad in the mid-'80s to form Roxette. Their soaring, feel-good tunes, which were packed with catchy hooks, hard-strummed guitars and Fredriksson's pane-rattling vocals, almost never made it out of Europe; an American studying abroad brought back a copy of 1988's Look Sharp! and got it to a Minneapolis radio station, and it caught fire from there. By 1989, that attention had spread worldwide and turned songs such as the swelling ballads “Listen to Your Heart” and “It Must Have Been Love” (the latter of which featured on the soundtrack to Pretty Woman) and the sugar-rush rocker “The Look” into international hits. Gessle and Fredriksson continued to record and tour into the 2010s, even after Fredriksson was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2002. She died in 2019 at the age of 61.

Rivalling only her teen hero David Bowie for continuous reinvention, Madonna Louise Ciccone has combined styles and images in ways both novel and groundbreaking. The Michigan native high-tailed it to New York as soon as she was old enough, trying her hand at dancing and leading bands before going solo to explore a simple, almost punky take on dance music with 1983’s “Lucky Star” and 1984’s “Borderline”. She quickly began to mingle the playful and provocative with hits like 1984’s “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl” (1985) and 1986’s “Papa Don’t Preach”, encouraging the decade’s youth to come of age right alongside her. Madonna polished off that era with 1989’s utterly self-possessed <i>Like a Prayer</i>—included on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list—which opens with the gospel lift and sweep of its evergreen title track and keeps the party going with the pure pop effervescence of “Cherish” and “Express Yourself”. Even as she became equally known for her movie roles and other extracurricular projects in the ’90s, Madonna proved that she could still command the culture with 1990’s “Vogue” and “Justify My Love”. Her 1996 <i>Evita</i> breakout “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” reinforced her as a proper balladeer, but another stylistic overhaul was just around the corner with 1998’s emotional techno-pop smashes “Frozen” and “Ray of Light”. She kept pace through the 2000s and 2010s, exploring disco, electro and more via 2000’s “Music” and 2005’s “Hung Up” as well as timely collabs with Nicki Minaj and Justin Timberlake. Through it all, Madonna has embraced change with such frequency and confidence that change has become her defining characteristic.

In the '80s, Kim Wilde ruled, landing 17 tracks on the UK pop charts. Her breakthrough hit, "Kids in America", established her as a feisty representative of an ascendant youth culture, but her later offerings, from defiantly anthemic singles to a pulsing cover of The Supremes, helped her maintain a steady presence on pop playlists around the world. Wilde's crystal-clear voice lends a striking vulnerability to even her most upbeat tracks; they may scan as products of the '80s, but they still resonate today.