The US Billboard song chart
The US Billboard song chart
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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The 20150328 data was the last one produced before the Billboard company forced the data to be withdrawn.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:
134
9
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.
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
A formula is applied to each entry to assign it a ranking within the year it was  released.  This allows followers of the Billboard chart to use a combination of the  year and position to uniquely identify every entry.  This formula takes into account the  total success of the song, so it cannot be finally calculated until every song released  in a given year has completed it's chart run (which might be well into the following  year of course).  As a result the final IDs for a particular year cannot be assigned until  the end of the following year.  This is one of the reasons why this site does not hold  much information for the current year.
No. 1 song on December 24 1936
Looking for the No. 1 song on the day I was born--December 24, 1936.
Thanks.
The charts didn't really exist in the 1930s, that's why our listing of  number one records starts in 1940
25 Sep 2011
Billboard info for songs listed from 1901 - 1929
Hi, again, this is my fifth time sending message to this site...What a  spectacular site. Love it!! First, the comprehensive info, then, the  nitty-gritty details on every songs. Thirdly (and most importantly) the forever  responsive reply. Irregardless its a meaningful questions, corrections or  downright simple questions.
Some sites don't reply at all..its annoying.
Anyway, my questions is during the period from 1901 to 1929, has billboard  exist yet? Do they have charts and radios doing the counting of the song  rotation? I thought billboard only start in the late 50's, wasn't it? I'm a  music aficionado, songs and info from the 30's is hard to find, and yet you  have the effort to go beyond the 20's.. May i know where in other sites i can  search for 20's music info (other than wiki)?
Arnaz
We're glad to see that you enjoy the site.  Your comments encourage us to  keep putting in the effort.
To answer your question:
Billboard magazine started publishing in 1894.  They published their first music "hit parade" in 1936 and their first "Hot 100" in 1958.  We understand  that from 1936 to 1958 the charts were irregular and didn't have a consistent  form.  In addition the focus was on "sheet music" sales so while the chart  will say, for example, that the song "Sentimental Journey" was a hit in  1945 it won't tell you if the version by the Merry Macs, Hal McIntyre or  Les Brown & Doris Day was the most popular.
A US music historian called Joel Whitburn has used the information from  the irregular charts, the Billboard magazine contents and other sources to  retrospectively calculate the charts from 1890 to 1958.  This is published  as a spreadsheet by a guy calling himself "Bullfrog" (the source is listed  in the chart entry).
That is the listing we base our information on.
© 2007-16, Steve Hawtin et  al.  Generated 15 Jan 2017 16:56 GMT. This data  may be freely copied provided that first the source is acknowledged, second a link to the tsort.info site is prominently incorporated and third the version number is attached (this data is  version 2.6.0013).  If you cannot, or do not wish to, follow these three restrictons  then you must licence the data (inquire via the contact form).
