Entire Year (or decade) charts?

I understand that Billboard put out a Hot 100 for each year, but has anyone ever taken EVERY song that hit the charts in a particular year and put them in order?

This chart might be 500 songs long, but I'd like to be able to look at songs that didn't make the year-end charts but maybe didn't miss them by much.

Another alternative would be every Hot 100 song of the decade, in popular order. (Now we're talking a list thousands of entries long.)

I'm looking specifically for the 1980s as that's what my station plays, but I'm sure other decades would be fascinating, too. I have the weekly charts but the effort involved in calculating chart positions for all those songs is completely overwhelming to me.

Does anybody know if anyone who's already done "the hard work" for me, or do I need to fight through this project by hand?

Yes, the Pop Annual has been one of my go-to Record Research books for years.

Paul, Aaron, PopArchivist, it appears my path forward is clear. :-)

Thank you so much for the advice! These publications look like they would be very helpful.

That sounds like an excellent idea. Would starting in 1940 add too much to
it? I can easily see that more pages does really add a lot to the size, but that
may just be another 35 pages, assuming all those from Pop Hits 40-54
were included.

Paul Haney wrote: This seems like a good time to mention that our next Record Research project will be an updated Pop Annual. We are talking about perhaps starting it in 1950 instead of 1955. It would go all the way thru 2023.

Count me in. I'd love to have the rest of the 50s added
to the book to round out the decade.

torcan wrote: Just out of curiosity, didn't record companies keep records of how many singles (and albums) were pressed/shipped/sold?

Ha. In 2006, an intern from Atlantic emailed me and asked if I could supply him with complete discographies of 12" singles released on Atlantic, Elektra, Warner Brothers, Tommy Boy, Cold Chillin' and Sugarhill.

So no, I get the impression most labels were just living in the moment. Their job was to make and sell records, not help chart/discography nerds and librarians of the future.

Right around the time the records were made & sold, sure, someone had that info. But I think most of those filing cabinets were emptied long ago... especially if any of it might be incriminating.

Edited by mjb50

mjb50 wrote: Right around the time the records were made & sold, sure, someone had that info. But I think most of those filing cabinets were emptied long ago... especially if any of it might be incriminating.

And let's not forget that the number of copies pressed/shipped does not always equal the number of copies sold. Lots of stuff went
into cutout bins, to salvage stores or into the dumpster.
I recall seeing ads in Billboard back in the early 70s for LPs I'd never even heard of that "shipped platinum".