How the 90s Music Hits bracket works
Rank 90s songs without dragging anything into rows. You get one matchup at a time — Smells Like Teen Spirit or ...Baby One More Time? Waterfalls or Wannabe? — and after 31 picks the bracket has a champion, with everything else placed by how far it got. Comparing two tracks is far easier than sorting 32 of them at once, which is why the finished list tends to survive a second look.
This bracket runs 5 rounds at the default 32-slot size (Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship), with every one of the 32 tracks in the field. The field is reshuffled on every play, so the same track can meet a different opponent in round one and finish somewhere else entirely. You can also play it at 8 or 16 slots for a shorter or longer run.
31 picks, 5 rounds
- Round of 3216 matchups
- Sweet 168 matchups
- Elite 84 matchups
- Final Four2 matchups
- Championship1 matchup
Roughly 2-4 minutes start to finish.
All 32 entrants
All 32 entrants are listed below, including Smells Like Teen Spirit, ...Baby One More Time, Waterfalls and Wannabe.
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Nirvana
...Baby One More Time
Britney Spears
Waterfalls
TLC
Wannabe
Spice Girls
No Scrubs
TLC
MMMBop
Hanson
No Diggity
Blackstreet
Creep
TLC
I Want It That Way
Backstreet Boys
Killing Me Softly
Fugees
Ice Ice Baby
Vanilla Ice
Gangsta's Paradise
Coolio
Jump Around
House of Pain
California Love
2Pac ft. Dr. Dre
Juicy
The Notorious B.I.G.
U Can't Touch This
MC Hammer
End of the Road
Boyz II Men
Return of the Mack
Mark Morrison
It's Gonna Be Me
*NSYNC
Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)
Backstreet Boys
Semi-Charmed Life
Third Eye Blind
Kiss from a Rose
Seal
This Is How We Do It
Montell Jordan
My Name Is
Eminem
Genie in a Bottle
Christina Aguilera
Say My Name
Destiny's Child
Iris
Goo Goo Dolls
Under the Bridge
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Losing My Religion
R.E.M.
Bitter Sweet Symphony
The Verve
Torn
Natalie Imbruglia
Finally
CeCe Peniston
Would rather group them than rank them? Open all 32 in the tier list maker and sort them into S, A, B, C, D and F tiers instead — same entrants, no matchups.
How everyone else ranked them
Aggregated from 6 completed 90s Music Hits brackets. Win rate is the share of head-to-head matchups each entrant has won across every play.
- 1
Iris
22W - 3L · won 3 brackets
88%
win rate
- 2
Smells Like Teen Spirit
15W - 4L · won 2 brackets
79%
win rate
- 3
Wannabe
13W - 5L · won 1 bracket
72%
win rate
- 4
Gangsta's Paradise
10W - 6L
63%
win rate
- 5
Semi-Charmed Life
9W - 6L
60%
win rate
- 6
My Name Is
8W - 6L
57%
win rate
- 7
Bitter Sweet Symphony
8W - 6L
57%
win rate
- 8
No Scrubs
7W - 6L
54%
win rate
- 9
No Diggity
7W - 6L
54%
win rate
- 10
U Can't Touch This
7W - 6L
54%
win rate
Getting a ranking you actually agree with
- 1Go with the track you would rather hear right now — instant reaction beats a considered take.
- 2The default run puts all 32 tracks in the draw. Short on time? Drop to 16 slots — a quicker run over a random 16 of them.
- 3Undo exists for a reason: an early-round mistake propagates all the way to the final, and there is no shame in taking it back.
90s Music Hits bracket FAQ
How many tracks are in the 90s Music Hits bracket?
The pool holds 32 tracks. A default run puts all of them in the draw and takes 31 picks across 5 rounds: Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship. Other field sizes are available too — 8, 16, 32 slots.
Which tracks are included?
Smells Like Teen Spirit, ...Baby One More Time, Waterfalls, Wannabe, No Scrubs, MMMBop, No Diggity, Creep, I Want It That Way, Killing Me Softly, Ice Ice Baby and Gangsta's Paradise, plus 20 more. Every entrant is listed further down this page with its artwork.
How long does the rank 90s songs take?
About 2-4 minutes — 31 choices at the default size, or 7 if you drop to a 8-slot bracket. It works the same on a phone as on a desktop, and no login is involved.
How does this compare to a drag-and-drop tier list maker?
Both are here, and the bracket is closer to a tier list than it looks. It ends with a champion, a runner-up and then every other track grouped by the round it went out in — which is exactly a set of tiers, decided by 31 direct comparisons rather than by your first guess at a layout. What it deliberately does not do is claim a precise gap between two tracks that never met. If you would rather place the tracks into S through F rows yourself, the tier list maker loads all 32 of them at bracketranker.com/tier-list-maker.
How did everyone else rank these tracks?
Every completed bracket feeds the 90s Music Hits community results page, which aggregates win rates across all plays and tracks how often each of the 32 entrants takes the title. It updates continuously, so it moves as more people play.
Can I build my own 90s music hits bracket?
Use the bracket maker: add your own tracks, name it, and share the link so other people play the same field. That is the route to take when this pool of 32 is missing something you would have picked, or when you want a version scoped to one era, label or franchise.