The US Billboard song chart

Song chart US Billboard

The Billboard magazine has published various music charts starting (with sheet music) in 1894, the first "Music Hit Parade" was published in 1936, the first "Music Popularity Chart" was calculated in 1940. These charts became less irregular until the weekly "Hot 100" was started in 1958. The current chart combines sales, airplay and downloads.

A music collector that calls himself Bullfrog has been consolidating the complete chart from 1894 to the present day. he has published this information in a comprehenive spreadsheet (which can be obtained at //bullfrogspond.com/).

The Bullfrog data assigns each song a unique identifier, something like "1968_076" (which just happens to be the Bee Gees song "I've Gotta Get A Message To You"). This "Whitburn Number" is provided to match with the books of Joel Whitburn and consists of the year and a ranking within the year. A song that first entered the charts in December and has a long run is listed the following year. This numbering scheme means that songs which are still in the charts cannot be assigned a final id, because their ranking might change. So the definitive listing for a year cannot be final until about April. In our listing we only use songs with finalised IDs, this means that every year we have to wait until last year's entries are finalised before using them.

(Source //bullfrogspond.com/, the original version used here was 20090808 with extra data from:

• the 2009 data from 20091219
• the 2010 data from 20110305
• the 2011 data from 20120929
• the 2012 data from 20130330
• the 2013 data from 20150328

The 20150328 data was the last one produced before the Billboard company forced the data to be withdrawn. As far as we know there are no more recent data sets available. This pattern of obtaining the data for a particular year in the middle of the following one comes from the way that the Bullfrog project generates the identifier for a song (what they call the "Prefix" in the spreadsheet). Recent entries are identified with keys like "2015-008" while older ones have keys like "2013_177". In the second case the underscore is significant, it indicates that this was the 177th biggest song released in 2013. Now, of course, during the year no one knows where a particular song will rank, so the underscore names can't be assigned until every song from a particular year has dropped out of the charts, so recent records are temporarily assigned a name with a dash. In about May of the following year the rankings are calculated and the final identifiers are assigned. That is why we at the Turret can only grab this data retrospectively.

Attributes

The original spreadsheet has a number of attributes, we have limited our attention to just a few of them:

• artist: The artist
• name: The name of the track
• position: The peak position that the song reached
• month: The month when it first entered the chart
• weeks: The total number of weeks that the song was in the chart
• yearpos: All the songs are given a unique ordering within the year
• bfid: A combination of the year and position give a unique identifier to each song
• length: The duration of some of the songs has been noted
• bpm: Some songs have a note of the beats per minute

artist

Another approach is to assign each song a score based on one divided by the year position (so number 1 is 1.0, 2 is a half and so on). If we then total each artist's songs we get a rough idea of how significant they are. Excluding all songs from before 1936 here are the top 20 artists in the Billboard charts:

name

The songs with the most entries on the chart were White Christmas (with 33 versions and a total of 110 weeks) and Stardust (with 19 and a total of 106 weeks).

position

The peak position that songs reached in the charts should show an smooth curve from number one down to the lowest position. This chart has more songs in the lower peak positions than one would expect. Before 1991 the profile of peak positions was exactly as you would expect, that year Billboard introduced the concept of "Recurrent" tracks, that is they removed any track from the chart which had spent more than twenty weeks in the chart and had fallen to the lower positions.

month

weeks

The effect of the "Recurrent" process, by which tracks are removed if they have spent at least twenty weeks in the chart and have fallen to the lower reaches, can clearly be seen in the strange spike in this attribute. This "adjustment" was intended to promote newer songs and ensure the chart does not become "stale". In fact since it was introduced in 1991 the length of long chart runs has increased, this might reflect the more conscious efforts of record companies to "game" the charts by controlling release times and promotions, or it could be that the decline in chart turnover reflects a reduced public interest in the singles charts.

When we plot the average length of a song's run for songs over the period covered it is clear that the chart has changed in the last 100 years. Except for a short period in the late 1960s and early 1970s the average length of chart run increased steadily from the 1920s to the 1990s.

This contrasts with other charts, such as the UK one where the recent trend has been for runs to get shorter. We have no good idea why this is.

yearpos & bfid

length

bpm

Back to song chart page

© 2007-2024, Steve Hawtin et al. Generated 17 Jan 2024 16:59 GMT. This data may also be accessed from tsort.info. (this data is version 2.8.0053).