Maroon 5 may have promised to stay for just “One More Night” in the big hit off their 2012 album Overexposed, but the pop-rock band ended up hanging around a whole lot longer. Billboard announced yesterday that the song had officially tied Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” for most number of weeks in the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 in 2012 so far. Both pop songs have logged nine whole weeks on top—and we’ll find out next week whether “One More Night” passes its predecessor for a definite win.  The two music powerhouses aren’t the only tie on the top ten songs list with the longest leads this year. After Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” and fun.’s “We Are Young,” there’s a tie between Taylor Swift‘s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You).” Next is a four-way tie between Flo Rida’s “Whistle,” Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain,” LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” and Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The last song on the list is Katy Perry’s “Part of Me.”  (The dominance of songs that hold onto the top spot for months at a time means that even some of the most omnipresent tunes—PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” notably, and the extant One Direction oeuvre—will probably never reach the top of the charts.)  (MORE: Why Is the ‘Song of the Fall’ Not a Thing?)  We called it, not just maybe: back in September we predicted that, based on chart placement alone, “One More Night” would be the next “Call Me Maybe”-level hit of the year. (To be fair, the original prediction was for a song that would last until the first week of December, but we’re calling it early.)  Will it happen again, a season of one song to rule them all? And can our totally unscientific music-prediction metric work its magic a second time, predicting which song will be the big hit around Valentine’s Day?  Again, we’ll start with the songs in the top 10 that haven’t yet reached the top and that have gained ground in the past week:  (MORE: One Direction’s Songwriters: They’re What Make the Boy Band Beautiful)  Then we knock out anything that’s been on the charts for more than 10 weeks and might be losing steam, leaving:  Rihanna isn’t charting in the digital downloads or on-demand categories, so she’s out of the running. Flo Rida is also still at No. 10, whereas Carly Rae Jepsen was No. 2 in June—plus, while the song is super danceable, it’s pretty hard to sing along with “I Cry”—so his chances are slim. That leaves Ke$ha and Bruno Mars. Which song will you be dancing to at a New Years Party?  On earworm-ness alone, the winner is clear. Check back in February to see if we were right:
Both acts have had a single top the charts for nine weeks in 2012. Don't say we didn't warn you