Interesting Hot 100 History Fact

Brian W. wrote: So there you have it. It appears that, from the 5/11/68 through 6/2/73 issues of "Billboard," the top 50 of the Hot 100 was completely sales-based -- no airplay info incorporated at all.

The key word here is "appears". We don't know for sure that's the case. Also, we don't know what the exact ratio formula was for each component.

Edited by Paul Haney

I'm pretty sure that Billboard had a policy that once something dropped out of the Top 50 (after a certain number of chart weeks), that it would fall totally off the Hot 100. This appears to be the case from about 1963-73. This is an educated guess based on the weekly chart positions.

Edited by Paul Haney

A few thoughts on this very interesting thread... I've always felt that sales were a much better indicator of popularity than radio airplay. As has been discussed here, before SoundScan, airplay reports were subjective at best. I interned at B-97 in New Orleans during the summer of 1984 and I worked in sales at a long-gone top 40 in Charlotte for about six months in 1987, and in both cases, the weekly top 40 charts were simply made up by the program director. Each record company rep worked their records each week with the PD and did whatever it took to keep the record moving up the station's chart. In '87, I remember hearing how the Virgin rep was pushing "Heart and Soul" by T'Pau by offering boxes of free Virgin CDs to give out on air. I'm sure much more serious payola/bribery went on that I was unaware of as well. :)

I do have faith that the public won't buy records/mp3s that they don't like, though. No matter how much reps pushed certain records, they just didn't sell. I remember B-97 choosing to add "Strangers In A Strange World" by Patrick Jude and Jenny Burton (back in '84) for some strange reason, and that one never took off, for example. I wondered at the time why we were playing that record. I think I can guess the reason now.

Using airplay for the bottom 50 also makes sense to me because recently released records probably didn't have very strong sales. Billboard could use airplay to help determine which songs should enter and move up the bottom half of the Hot 100, but once they hit the top 50, then sales would need to continue to move up or the record would top off around that part of the chart.

I know that many of you worked at radio stations as well and have your own stories. From my very limited experience, I can understand why Billboard removed the airplay component during that time. :)

Paul, do you still work at Record Research? Does Joel recall this period of
non-airplay Hot 100 data? (Or when it officially lifted)

Keep in mind that pre-Soundscan, sales reports were as inaccurate as airplay
reports. It was always a vague idea and a very small sample.

From a programming standpoint, one thing to consider is that not every radio listener is a music buyer; therefore the sales figures may or may not accurately reflect what is popular with a given station's overall audience. As a music director, I did track local sales, but they were usually a comparatively minor consideration in determining airplay rotations. The station's in-house call-out research played the most important role, which was not surprising, considering the fudge factor surrounding the national airplay and sales figures in the trade papers.

Country radio had its own Billboard chart-related peculiarities. Within a week or two after I'd become MD at a Radio & Records reporting station, I received word from several record reps that we'd been named a Billboard reporter, too. It didn't take long at all to realize that to the Nashville record gang, Billboard was, by far, the more important of the two trades.

The record reps' game was pretty simple: report their records at number one to Billboard until Billboard charted them at number one and then drop them. Immediately. That wasn't going to be the case with our station, which was hit-driven and recurrent-heavy and tended to play the records we did add for as long our listeners said we should. Our published chart sent to area stores and the trades reflected the ups and downs of our actual airplay.

On the other hand, the weekly chart we'd receive from another big country station up the turnpike typically listed sixty or more current singles, none of which ever showed any downward movement. Even a major country hit on that same station would move to the top and then - poof! - immediately disappear. Whether they still played said records after the fact, I don't know, although it would have been tough to fit them in with the dozens of newer records on their chart which were vying for airtime (and assuming that some of the latter weren't merely paper adds.)

Billboard's country chart reflected the effects of this gaming of the listings by the sheer number of songs that made it to number one during each of those years during the early-to-mid '80s:

Year........Total #1 hits
1981..............47
1982..............47
1983..............50
1984..............50
1985..............51
1986..............51
1987..............49

That's an incredible amount of turnover at the top position. During that same seven-year stretch, the longest stay at #1 was only three weeks (Randy Travis' "Forever And Ever, Amen" in mid-'87.) Only eighteen other records managed to notch even a second week at the top during that period. That leaves the other 326 (!) chart-toppers at one-week-and-done. This pattern persisted until January of 1990, when Billboard began tracking country airplay via BDS monitoring. BOOM! The very first number one out of the chute (Clint Black's "Nobody's Child") ran up three weeks on top. In short order, others were racking up three, four... even five weeks at number one that very same year. Billboard went from listing 49 number ones in 1989 to a mere 24 the following year.

Small wonder, then, that such fun and games led to R&R becoming a much more valuable programming tool to radio folks than Billboard.