It’s that time of year again when we look back at the amazing art and content we received over the past 12 months and highlight our favourites. In terms of music, I don’t want to outline an order of least favourite to most. Instead, I have put together a playlist of 50 of some of my most listened to songs of the past year. Now this list obviously excludes a lot of great music as well. I wanted to try and keep the number round, and I didn’t want to overlap any artists, so in many ways this list also represents my 50 favourite artists of the year, while sadly omitting some of their other great songs (I’m looking at you St. Vincent!).

Now the playlist is on Spotify, and because of that there is one artist who is glaringly missing from the list. It is sad that Taylor Swift decided to remove all of her content from the service, especially when 1989 may just be the best pop album of the year. If I could, I would have included the awesome “New Romantics” on the playlist from the deluxe edition of the album. Oh well, you will just have to listen to it separately.

Further to that, can I just say how awesome this year was for women in music? From break out artists like Lykke Li, Tove Lo, and St. Vincent, to the mainstays of Taylor and Beyoncé, women were just killing it in the charts this year and this playlist is carried by all of them!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the playlist and let me know what your favourite songs of 2014 were and why they should have been included in the list.

Follow Tom on Twitter @thomaskagar