Since I missed the drunken luncheon at which the rules of this contest were finalized, I have a question about the qualification of songs for a given year. Using the assumptive close that I learned in a sales course many years ago, I'm going to phrase my question as a statement:

Presumably, songs re-released on compilation albums do not qualify for inclusion in the year of the compilation's release, but alternative versions of previously released songs (remixes, remakes, live versions, mashups, etc) are valid.