the latest messy top 10 issue

Taylor Swift--3 songs that have never received any airplay crash into the top 10 because of current tallying practices. Absolutely no offense to Taylor, because We Are Never Getting Back Together belongs there, but this is really a cheap way for artists to break previous records held by artists who truly did have numerous top 10 hits from the same album....

Yes, it seems to me like the charts are becoming somewhat irrelevant. Maybe they always were, I don't know. In my opinion, the real measure of a hit in our current singles-driven market is how many copies the digital song sold. A million isn't even a big hit anymore. A real hit is at least 2 million copies.

There have been some very interesting points brought up about the charts recently (in this and other posts). I may be in the minority, but I've never been one to feel like the Hot 100 is gospel. I think you have to look at more than one chart to get an accurate picture of popularity.

I think we also often lose sight of the fact that these charts are ranking a song's popularity for a given week. I think we all agree that it would be difficult to compare today's chart with the charts from 30 years ago. It's also not necessarily a fair comparison when placing one week's chart against another week from the same time period. For all we know, the #1 song one week may have sold 50,000 copies and received 5,000 radio spins, and another week the #1 song might only have sold 20,000 copies and received 2,000 spins.

The bottom line is that most of the chart records (i.e. who had the most top 10 hits) are based on one thing alone: peak position. They don't take into account actual number of sales, actual radio airplay, or number of weeks on the chart. Even if they were based on this info, it would still be unfair to compare any two weeks worth of data because of too many variables that differ on a week-to-week basis.

I do feel like the Hot 100 is a nice chart (probably the best we have) for telling us which SONGS (not "singles") are most popular this week. I'm pretty sure that was the original intent of the chart and still is today. It's fun to look at chart "records" like how many songs did an artist place in the top 10, but I really feel like you have to take this information with a grain of salt. I doubt I'll see in my lifetime any artist surpass the Beatles or Elvis in total record sales, even if Taylor Swift places more songs in the top 10.

Edited by aaronk

I definitely agree that there were songs that should have been on the charts back when i was growing up but weren't--particularly songs that got heavy rotation on MTV and were really huge hits.

But when I look at the top 10 charts back from the 80s, it is rare that I see a song in the top 10 that I didn't hear in heavy rotation on the radio. As we moved out of the 80s and into the 90s, that issue gets really bad. By the mid-90s, I'd say there were at least half of the songs in the top 10 each week that I never heard on top 40 radio, at least not here in NY.

budaniel wrote: But when I look at the top 10 charts back from the 80s, it is rare that I see a song in the top 10 that I didn't hear in heavy rotation on the radio. As we moved out of the 80s and into the 90s, that issue gets really bad. By the mid-90s, I'd say there were at least half of the songs in the top 10 each week that I never heard on top 40 radio, at least not here in NY.

It sounds like you would be better off looking at top 40 airplay charts for those years rather than the Hot 100. It is this exact reason that I rely heavily on R&R and Mediabase to tell me what the big hits were for 1990 and later. Yes, it can be argued that top 10 Hot 100 songs were also "big hits," but I agree that many of those sales-based hits are much more unfamiliar due to lack of pop airplay.

Nevertheless, I don't fault the Hot 100 for it. That chart is not an airplay-only chart, and it never was meant to be.