The worlds greatest song chart act
As the site generation page explains the list of
songs does not reflect the
most popular songs of all time
since there are variable levels of charts for different
historical periods. There are a number of reasonable ways to compare artists
of different periods, further down this page there is an
analysis that examines the top songs, but first we show what happens when
you list the top artists of each year and tallying up
the number of years each artist held the top slots.
The charts for the 1920s are much less certain than later ones, so maybe
Paul Whiteman does not deserve his position. It is also notable that
since we last calculated these scores both The Beatles and
Elvis Presley have lost one year at the top slot, this reflects
the fact that we now have charts from a wider range of countries. It is interesting to
note that this fact has improved Madonna's position.
The top five artists are far ahead of the rest. If the entries for John Lennon,
George Harrison and Paul McCartney's groups were to be included
The Beatles would clearly be top.
Here are the top five song artists for each year from 1920 to 2011.
This analysis was done with data version 2.1.044
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Another Similar Approach
The figure above shows the order that results from looking at the songs rather
than artist's success. Each song has been scored based on the position it reached
in the overall year chart, 1.0 for the number 1, 0.5 for number 2 and so on, and each
artist has been rated based on the number of songs reaching the number one slot, or top
5, or top 10 etc. We started these at 1930, because the earlier ones are too
sparse to give reasonable results.
The first thing to note is that once again the top 5 artists are significantly ahead of the rest.
In this measure The Beatles are ahead of Elvis Presley (but
not by much).
This analysis was done with data version 1.10.0014
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