https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/ Copyright (c) 2006-2013 Web Wiz Forums - All Rights Reserved. Fri, 08 May 2026 12:08:42 +0000 Sat, 20 Oct 2012 14:26:22 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Web Wiz Forums 12.07 360 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/RSS_post_feed.asp?TID=7105 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum//images/Top-40-Music-on-CD-Forum-Logo.png https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/ https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35719&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35719 Author: JMD1961
Subject: 7105
Posted: 20 October 2012 at 2:26pm

torcan wrote: [QUOTE=AndrewChouffi] I should go back and check my old Billboards, but I wonder how many songs peaked at No. 2 during that era - probably not many.

Per my "Joel Whitburn's Country Annual" here are the number of #2 peaking records for each year of the '80s:

1980 - 8 hits
1981 - 8
1982 - 9
1983 - 10
1984 - 7
1985 - 11
1986 - 5
1987 - 14
1988 - 11
1989 - 6

By contrast, in 1990 (the first year of monitored airplay) there were 17 songs that peaked at #2. So more, but not many more as you'd might think.

The real difference to me is the difference in the number of records making the Top 10. Between 1980 and 1989, an average of 125 songs peaked in the top 10 each year. But in 1990, only 100. In 1991, only 91. With songs fallen backwards naturally, there was less room for new songs to move up.

Which explains why executives wanted them out of the way quicker, huh?]]> Sat, 20 Oct 2012 14:26:22 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35719&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35719 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35716&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35716 Author: torcan
Subject: 7105
Posted: 20 October 2012 at 7:21am

AndrewChouffi wrote: To EdisonLite: The reason is because Country promo execs & independent promoters were such bedfellows with Country radio PDs that the promoters could tell the PDs the equivalent of "We took the record to #1, we don't need your help on it anymore; drop it and make room on your playlist for our NEW record we're working" & the PDs would oblige (Billboard's accuracy be damned). Andy

Considering there was a time lag between when a chart was tabulated and when it appeared in the magazine (usually a week-to-10 days), I guess they must have had the timing down perfectly. I guess if a song was at No. 2 with a bullet, they pretty well knew that would be the next No. 1 because the song ahead of it would drop out the next week, so they'd tell the PDs to drop it then(?)

I should go back and check my old Billboards, but I wonder how many songs peaked at No. 2 during that era - probably not many.]]> Sat, 20 Oct 2012 07:21:46 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35716&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35716 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35715&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35715 Author: AndrewChouffi
Subject: 7105
Posted: 20 October 2012 at 5:48am

To EdisonLite:

The reason is because Country promo execs & independent promoters were such bedfellows with Country radio PDs that the promoters could tell the PDs the equivalent of "We took the record to #1, we don't need your help on it anymore; drop it and make room on your playlist for our NEW record we're working" & the PDs would oblige (Billboard's accuracy be damned).

Andy]]> Sat, 20 Oct 2012 05:48:17 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35715&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35715 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35712&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35712 Author: EdisonLite
Subject: 7105
Posted: 19 October 2012 at 8:59am

I always wondered - what was the reason for those huge drops from #1 on the country chart? Did virtually all stations stop playing a song the moment it hit #1 (which seems odd)? Did all listeners (coincidentally) stop purchasing the 45 the moment it hit #1? It seemed like some manipulation - because I didn't think everyone would abandon a song the moment it hit #1 (to be off the top 40 or pretty close to that the next week), but I couldn't figure out exactly what.]]> Fri, 19 Oct 2012 08:59:19 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35712&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35712 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35711&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35711 Author: JMD1961
Subject: 7105
Posted: 18 October 2012 at 8:10pm

Yup. The "sudden drop" of hits on the country charts is one of the reasons that Billboard made it the first chart to use monitored airplay. They wanted to make it more accurate.

Ironically, on the modern country airplay chart, which was REALLY slow, they were forced to impose "recurrent rules" in order to get upward movement. The result? Songs that dropped completely off the chart from the top 10. Go figure.]]> Thu, 18 Oct 2012 20:10:05 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35711&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35711 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35710&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35710 Author: mstgator
Subject: 7105
Posted: 18 October 2012 at 5:50pm

Perusing Whitburn's Country Annual, which shows full chart runs for all
Top Five hits, I count at least three songs falling from #1 completely out of
the Top 40 in 1981 alone... and most of the other Top Five hits from the end
of the '70s through most of the '80s only spent one or two weeks in the Top
40 after hitting the top. Must have been a kick listening to American
Country Countdown back then. (Mickey Gilley's "You Don't Know Me"
appears to be the record holder as far as chart toppers are concerned,
tumbling from 1-47).]]> Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:50:34 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35710&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35710 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35701&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35701 Author: Yah Shure
Subject: 7105
Posted: 17 October 2012 at 3:34pm

torcan wrote: --re. the Country chart - [b]that rule[/b] led to some incredible falls from the No. 1 position.

There was no "rule," as such, on Billboard's part. Their country chart simply reflected the results of the many Billboard reporters who were all-too-happy to toe the Nashville line. I wasn't; consequently, being a Billboard reporter was a royal pain.]]> Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:34:19 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35701&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35701 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35699&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35699 Author: torcan
Subject: 7105
Posted: 17 October 2012 at 2:16pm

Just some comments about this thread:

--I first heard about this on another board a few months ago and was very surprised. I thought the Hot 100 was ALWAYS compiled with sales and airplay information for all records. I guess this explains why singles would sometimes drop from just outside the top 20 all the way off the Hot 100 the next week up until the early '70s

--I always thought sales of a record were more important than airplay. When I first started subscribing to Billboard, I was surprised so much weight was given to airplay. I figured if someone was willing to pop down their money to buy a record, that should be more important...however, reading others responses above make sense

--listening to old "American Top 40" episodes from the early '70s, I believe on some episodes Casey stated it was sales information from 100 record stores and airplay from 53 stations. Didn't seem like much - that's an average of 2 stores and 1 radio station per state. When I started subscribing in the early '80s, there were 125 reporting stations

--re. the Country chart - that rule led to some incredible falls from the No. 1 position. I can't remember the record, but I know at least one single fell from No. 1 to something like 44 or 47 in the early '80s.]]> Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:16:38 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35699&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35699 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35698&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35698 Author: Yah Shure
Subject: 7105
Posted: 17 October 2012 at 1:09pm

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.]]> Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:09:46 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35698&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35698 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35696&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35696 Author: Hykker
Subject: 7105
Posted: 17 October 2012 at 6:22am

musicmanatl wrote: 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.

That is my experience as well. I only worked at one station that was a Billboard reporter. I was just a part-timer and don't know what the PD did when he sent in his weekly reports, but I do know that we as jocks did not keep track of the number of times we played a given song (though we did keep a request log).

By the time I'd moved into a programming position, we were using Selector and music-on-hard-drive automation, so it was a simple matter to determine spin count when we reported to R&R.

]]> Wed, 17 Oct 2012 06:22:08 +0000 https://top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7105&PID=35696&title=interesting-hot-100-history-fact#35696