Hot 100 Compiled In 1969

Don't remember if this has been posted here before, but there's a big article on just how the Billboard Hot 100 was
compiled in the issue dated September 13, 1969. Lots of great, detailed information!

You can read it here (starts on page 56)...

Billboard -
September 13, 1969

Thanks for the link!! David Gleason's site is just
chock full of interesting historical info, and the old
Billboards, R&Rs and other trade publications are
fascinating to read.

Of course, the radio play data was nowhere near as
accurate back then as it is today with BDS monitoring.
I imagine most of the major market stations had
accurate playlists, but maybe not so much in smaller
(yet still significant) markets. A station I worked
at in the mid-ish 70s was a BB reporter, but we didn't
keep logs of what we played...yeah, we followed a
clock (ours had categories defined by colors), so you
could get a pretty good idea of how many times a song
got played, but it wasn't exact.
And the trades were at the mercy of how honest the
PD/MD was with reporting..."paper adds" (songs that
were reported, but not played, or maybe just
overnight) were rampant, as conversely songs were
played but not reported (sounds counter-intuitive, but
it happened).

jebsib wrote: I'd still love to know when airplay was re-introduced to the Top 50.

I'm not 100% certain, but I believe it happened for the week ending June 9, 1973. You can also
find that issue at the same site.

Edited by Paul Haney

Thanks for posting that, Paul. Really fascinating. So at
the time the article was published, the difference
between the final data gathering day and the date on the
magazine issue was 12 days.