If you are a fan of music you know about the Billboard Music Charts. The Billboard company was founded in 1894 and is known for publishing pieces involving news, video, opinion, reviews, events, style and of course, it’s music charts. It was on January 4th of 1936 that Billboard magazine published its first music hit parade (chart). The first Music Popularity Chart was calculated in July 1940 and the company has been reporting and expanding its charts ever since.
Currently, The Hot 100 combines data from single sales, radio airplay, digital downloads, and streaming activity. This includes data from YouTube and other video sites. Prior to 1991 Billboard obtain its data from manual reports filled out by radio stations and stores. That November Billboard used Nielsen SoundScan and Nielson Broadcast Data Systems (BDS) to chart the Hot 100 and R&B chart for that year.
In 1983, Michael Jackson dominated March to April with ‘Billie Jean’ and April to May with ‘Beat It’. He had the most Hot 100’s that year. Other artists like The Police and Irene Cara dominated the summer. Ten years later in 1993, Whitney Houston topped the chart with what was arguably the song of the year ‘I will Always Love You (From “The Bodyguard”)’. Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey were on fire with hits like ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ and ‘Hero’. The twist is that in the 50th anniversary issue of Billboard, prior to the official implementation of SoundScan tracking in November 1991, many radio stations and retail stores removed songs from their manual reports after the associated record labels stopped promoting a particular single. So can we even trust the charts for the years prior to 1991?
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