Experience a year’s worth of Top 40 radio in 4 minutes with DJ Earworm’s annual pop megamix 

Since 2007, mashup artist DJ Earworm has been compressing months’ worth of barely tolerating Top 40 radio into reliably fun megamixes that blaze through 25 of the pop hits that defined the year. Many others have picked up on the trend in the intervening years, so Earworm’s United State Of Pop 2012, titled “Shine Brighter,” may not be this year’s first Hot 100 mashup (it technically hasn’t been released yet, but it premiered on Canadian radio over the weekend), but it is one of the best, focusing heavily on Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know,” Fun’s “We Are Young,” Ke$ha’s “Die Young,” and Nicki Minaj’s “Starships,” plus snippets of many others, including the inevitable Flo Rida appearance. Interestingly, the year’s two biggest breakout pop-song stories, “Call Me Maybe” and “Gangnam Style,” get only the briefest of passing appearances, due to the fact that Earworm, as he recently told Chicago magazine, was more concerned with reflecting his chosen message for this year, that of “awakening.” Cue Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake.”