Why can't I find the entry for artist XXX or song XXX?

One question that sometimes comes up is about an artist or song that the user expects to see but cannot find. If there is a missing hit track on an artist's page then that needs to be fixed, however if you can't find a particular artist that could be legitimate (but, have you looked in the site index?).

For example one user complained that they couldn't find the artist "Puddle of Mudd" who had a hit in 2002 with "She Hates Me".

The listing on the site do not cover all the entries in the included charts, just the highest achievers. We list the top entries across the world from each year, all the songs of the 1000 top song acts, all the albums of the 1000 top album acts and all the songs that match the 1000 top song titles.

There are a two different motivations for only listing a subset of the complete data, firstly the copyright issues and secondly the site navigation.

Copyright

The data here quotes values from a variety of sources, but, because it combines inputs it presents an "original work of authorship" what we have is a "compilation work" (see //www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html).

If we were to include all the entries of any one chart then the copyright owners could legitimately claim we were infringing their rights. Any user would be able to recreate, for example, the complete Billboard chart. While it is true that other sites, such as Wikipedia, quote source charts in full, we deliberately only quote a proportion of any of the input charts, for most charts much less than 50%.

In addition the value of these listings comes not from the contribution of any single input chart but rather from the level of creativity applied to bring together data from a variety of incompatible sources. The unique value of this site comes from the fact that it relates, for example a Billboard hit to its position in the Japanese charts. We strongly believe that any reasonable person would consider our listings clearly represent "fair use" of the source information.

Navigation

Most of the 529,571 entries are just not interesting, more than 65% of all the chart entries only appear once in a single country's chart and are not even present anywhere else. The portion of entries that is included in the web site constitutes about 40-45% of all the song and album entries and covers about 25% of all the artists, however, for example, every album that has more that 10% of the top album's score has an entry on the site.

Adding the "less significant" entries would make it more difficult to navigate the site and, for the majority of users, would not add additional information that was valuable. Any user that wants to examine a particular chart in detail can do so on the original source. That is one of the reasons why we include links to the original data.

Back to Introduction

Comments

The comments here are from the the MusicID impact site site. This version is not able to accept comments yet

18 Oct 2016

Xxx song

+Imran hashmi k all xxx song

8 Dec 2015

Vince Gill

Please add vince gill, both Albums & Songs please

See the FAQ "Why can't I find the entry for artist XXX or song XXX?"

As that page says we only list the top 1000 artists, any artist that doesn't reach that level does not have its own page

There are a number of reasons for this (which we list on the FAQ page)

30 Jun 2015

What charts are used for before 1930?

What sources of information are used to determine lists of songs, recordings and artists prior to Billboard's charts?

The page "Song Charts" lists all the sources of information

26 Sep 2013

Little River Band

Thank you for the site. I have looked for this kind of sites for a long time... This site is fantastic.

I looked through impact-chart-2-2-0029.csv and I found out some data are missing in some famous artists.

For example, for Little River Band, only three songs are listed. Very famous songs are missing (The Night Owls, Lonesome loser, Cool Change, We Two...) I think Little River Band can enter "Song Artist 1000" whenever all the missing songs are added.

Thanks

We have 22 Little River Band songs listed in the complete dataset, they still don't make the top 1000 (they are only just outside the top 1000).

Artists that are outside the top 1000 do not have all their songs listed, just the ones that were big enough to make the top 100 of any year.

The reasons for this are explained in the FAQ page "Why can't I find the entry for artist XXX or song XXX?"

15 Apr 2012

to make this wonderful site even more useful...

Hi -- Yours it without a doubt the most useful single resource for music I have ever seen, outside of Youtube, but I very nearly did not find it. I'd been looking for some time for a website that pooled and synthesised chart information, and despite diligent searching only wound up stumbling on your project through the links from another site. What I was looking for was a way to acquaint myself with the chronological chart history of recorded music globally, but wanted it all in one place so I wouldn't have to resort to 100 different charts, if the information could even be had. What you've done here is just amazing.

At any rate, what I wanted to suggest was that you could make this incredible resource even more valuable -- and avoid all the pestering from people wondering where their favourite missing hit fits into all of this -- by providing a catchment supplemental page for each year that holds the remainder of the songs that didn't make your Top 100: it wouldn't even be necessary to rank them for this to be immeasurably valuable.

My main interest is in cultural variations, juxtaposed against the big picture. As such, I'm probably in the minority here, but I'd also love to see a sort option that would allow you to select a country or region and see a list of songs that only charted in their part of the world in a given year.

Anyway, annoying suggestions aside, just an incredible website. You've done something culturally important here.

Thanks for the kind words.

Obviously we list the top 100 each year because they tend to be the songs that users are most interested in. However there are many other advantages in adopting the structure we do.

For example by not listing all the entries in, for example, the Billboard charts we ensure that our quoting of their data is what is called in US law an "original work of authorship". We quote less than 50% of their entries, so anyone interested in discovering all the US chart entries has to do so on their site. We obviously only cater for those that want to combine information from many different county's charts.

In addition by focusing on the top entries we end up with only the higher quality data.

When we check the entries obtained from the external sources we find that they are on average about 97% accurate (that is not obviously with inconsistent names). When we merge in another chart there are processes that check the new entries against the existing data, these can spot many of these types of mismatches, provided the new songs already exist in another chart.

The majority of song entries (about 68.1% of them) only exist in a single chart, in other words for two thirds of the chart entries there is no confirmation of spelling or song name.

On average we have more than 1,200 song entries for each year, by showing only the top 100 songs we are selecting the 8% that have the most validated entries (because their names are confirmed in so many other charts). If we were to list all the entries then two thirds of the entries would be uncheckable.

So for both those reasons we would need a lot more convincing before we extended the pages.

You also suggested that we could analyse charts by region. We looked at this when we added the "Europe v North America" pages. There is obviously a trade-off between smoothing charts out so you get an accurate impression across the whole world and focusing on individual territories and getting a chaotic picture that is dominated by the "lumpy" nature of individual charts.

We did a bit of statistical modelling trying various combinations and came to the conclusion that we could track success for a given year in Europe and North America, so that's why we created those pages. We also track success in the 9 regions (shown in the profile pictures) provided we combine entries across the whole range of years.

Both these cases have their limits, the Europe v North America pages only show the top 20 songs, the profile pictures have obvious issues for success before 1950. Our experience has been that these "focused analysis" exercises tend to obscure actual trends behind a flurry of accidental results (that's why we ended up doing statistical modelling, to prove that this was inherent in the data rather than a consequence of the particular processing we were doing).

Of course we also resisted listing number ones by date for a long time because of exactly the same types of concern about accuracy, and glossing over the reasons why no-one really knows what was actually number one on the 6 Feb 1952. However that now seems to be one of the most popular areas on the whole site, most users it seems would rather have certainty than accuracy.

Have you downloaded the CSV file from the versions page? Using that data you could do a crude version of what you are suggesting.

31 Oct 2011

CAN'T FIND SONG :(

do IT to me one more time was a disco hit in the 1970's and some DJ's stillplay it today, it's a rare song, but i just would love to know who performed it! please, can't find it on youtube please help

We think you mean "Do That to Me One More Time" which was a hit in 1980 (just outside the 1970s) for Captain & Tennille.

We're sure that with that title you will find it on YouTube.

22 Aug 2010

Index

Hello,

This is a fascinating site. I wanted to make sure I was reading the index correctly. Did Dorothy Lamour fail to chart any singles whatsoever? It seems that way in the index, but when I was looking at the comments included for the year 1939 it looks like she had a single that charted but did not make the cut for the top 60 songs of that year.

This site does not list all the entries of all charts, for one thing that would make the lists too long to be easily navigated. However more importantantly we focus on showing the songs that were hits in multiple charts, that provides an insight that is not avaliable elsewhere. In addition it does not infringe on the copyright holders of each chart.

Dorothy Lamour is a case in point, in fact she had 5 hits in the Billboard charts "Swing High Swing Low" and "Moonlight & Shadows" in 1937, "Lovelight in the Starlight" in 1938 and "I Go for That" and "Strange Enchantment" in 1939. However she didn't appear in any other charts.

The best way to investigate her career is to examine the Billboard chart, either by visiting their site or by following the link we have to the Bullfrog data.

The page http://the MusicID impact site.info/music/faq_missing_data.htm explains why some artists, songs and titles are not listed.