"I.G.Y." - Donald Fagen

NightAire wrote: Wonder if more stations would have played it? Would it have been a bigger hit?

It hit #6 in Radio & Records and #3 in the Gavin Report,
so it got plenty of airplay. Another case of a 1982 hit
that didn't get its due in Billboard.

Edited by Paul Haney

Loveland wrote: Paul Haney wrote: It hit #6 in Radio & Records and #3 in the Gavin Report, so it got plenty of airplay. Another case of a 1982 hit that didn't get its due in Billboard. I disagree. The single didn't sell. The Hot 100 chart should've always been based on sales alone, without the inclusion of airplay.

While I don't have access to sales info on that song you
do make a good point. R&R's charts were strictly airplay
from their reporters, I presume the same goes for Gavin
(generally smaller market stations who didn't qualify for
R&R reporter status), so since sales were factored in
BB's charts it makes sense it wouldn't have charted as
high if it was mostly a turntable hit.

Loveland wrote: The Hot 100 chart should've always been based on sales alone, without the inclusion of airplay.

I totally disagree with that statement. As a Top 40 fan
growing up, I couldn't afford to buy all the singles I
wanted, but I could hear them on the radio. The two
(sales and airplay) have always gone hand-in-hand and I
thought it was cool that Billboard had a formula that
combined the two into one definitive chart.

Paul Haney wrote: There was something going on with Billboard in the 1982/1983 time frame. There are just way too many songs that made the Top 10 (or even Top 5) in R&R that didn't make the Top 20 (or even Top 40) in Billboard. That can't all be attributed to poor sales numbers. Even at the time, I found it weird that songs like "Gypsy" by Fleetwood Mac and "It's Raining Again" by Supertramp were falling short of the Top 10 in Billboard. After my week- by-week research on the R&R charts, I can say that the R&R and Billboard charts were always pretty close in the other eras, with much less glaring differences than existed in 1982/83.

The charts of 1982-83 were strange to say the least.
Songs were spending multiple weeks at their peak
position then dropping out of sight very quickly.
Large portions of the top 40 remained static from week
to week making it hard for songs below them to move
up. This has been discussed a fair bit on other
forums, but a lot of this had to do with the chart
rules at the time concerning bullets (or stars and
superstars, as Billboard used back then) – that songs
had to first lose their stars before failing down the
chart.

Do you think the chart director just got lazy around
this time and lost interest? He’d been doing it for
close to 10 years by this point. There has to be some
reason for this weird anomaly.

In April 1983 he was either fired (most likely) or
left on his own (depending on which story you believe)
and the charts returned to normal.