Billboard charts

• 1. Introduction

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  Billboard charts have been measuring what America listens to since July 1913, when the magazine published its first ranked list of popular sheet music. Over the following century, the charts grew from a simple ten-item bestseller tally into a system spanning hundreds of individual rankings across genres, formats, countries, and platforms. How did a list of sheet music sales become the music industry's most authoritative scoreboard? And what happened when digital platforms began rewriting the rules of how a song could even qualify?

• 2. Sheet Music to the Hot 100

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  "Last Week's Ten Best Sellers Among The Popular Songs" ran in Billboard in July 1913, ranking sheet music at a time when that format was how most people encountered popular songs. By 1928, radio had grown powerful enough that Billboard added radio performances to in-person theatre appearances in a chart called "Popular Numbers Featured by Famous Singers and Leaders". On the 4th of January 1936, the magazine published its first pop chart based on actual record sales, listing the ten top-selling records of three leading record companies, as reported by those companies themselves. The data was self-reported and narrow, but the idea of a unified national sales ranking had taken hold.

  On the 27th of July 1940, Billboard published the first "Billboard Music Popularity Chart", which separated retail sales, sheet music, jukebox plays, and radio airplay into distinct lists. The ten-song "Best Selling Retail Records" list is considered the true guide to a song's popularity in that era. Its first number one was "I'll Never Smile Again" by Tommy Dorsey, featuring vocals by Frank Sinatra.

  In November 1955, Billboard combined retail sales, jukebox plays, and disc jockey charts into a single composite called "The Top 100", with "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" by The Four Aces at the top. This chart is the direct predecessor to the Hot 100. The jukebox chart ceased publication after the 17th of June 1957, and the disc jockey chart ended after the 28th of July 1958. The Hot 100 launched the following week, on the 4th of August 1958, with "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson as its very first number one.

• 3. The SoundScan Turning Point

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  Prior to November 1991, Billboard relied on manual reports from radio stations and retail stores rather than independent tracking. According to the magazine's own 100th-anniversary issue, record labels had significant influence over those reports. When a label stopped promoting a single, stations and stores would often remove the song from their submissions, causing chart positions to drop sharply and shortening chart lives artificially.

  In 1990, the country singles chart became the first Billboard chart to use SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems, replacing self-reported figures with independently measured data. The Hot 100 and the R&B chart followed in 1991. Today, all Billboard charts use this technology.

  A separate policy shift arrived in December 1998, when Billboard allowed tracks to chart based on airplay alone, without requiring a commercial single release. Before that change, a number of substantial radio hits had never appeared on the Hot 100 because major labels chose not to release them as standalone singles. Among the songs caught in that gap were The Cardigans' "Lovefool", Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" (which peaked at 42 when it was finally eligible), and the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris", which hit number 9. The Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris", Sugar Ray's "Fly", OMC's "How Bizarre", and No Doubt's "Don't Speak" all spent time in this limbo before the rule changed.

• 4. Streaming Rewrites the Formula

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  On the 12th of February 2005, Billboard began counting paid digital downloads from services such as iTunes, Rhapsody, and AmazonMP3, meaning a song could now chart on download activity alone. Two years later, on the 31st of July 2007, the Hot 100 added digital streams sourced from Yahoo and AOL's platforms. At the time, that streaming data accounted for an estimated five percent of the chart's total points, a minor adjustment that would eventually become the dominant force in chart calculations.

  In October 2012, Billboard extended the combined sales, streaming, and all-format airplay methodology to country, rock, Latin, and rap charts, which had previously been airplay-only. That change proved controversial. Songs with crossover appeal to pop radio and other formats gained higher positions on genre charts, while songs that appealed primarily to core genre fans fell. The Christian and gospel charts adopted the same methodology in late 2013.

  On the 20th of February 2013, YouTube video streaming data entered the formula. Billboard specified that the YouTube streams counted were official video streams, Vevo on YouTube streams, and user-generated clips using authorized audio. On the 25th of June 2015, the sales reporting cycle shifted from a Monday-to-Thursday cycle to a Friday-to-Thursday cycle, timed to match the IFPI's global move to release all new music on Fridays.

• 5. Genre Charts and Their Origins

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  "Harlem Hit Parade" appeared in 1943, making it one of the earliest genre-specific Billboard charts. It was renamed "Best-Selling Race Records" in 1948 and "Best-selling Rhythm and Blues Records" in 1949, eventually becoming "Soul Singles" in 1969 and arriving at its current form as Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs. The country equivalent began in 1948 as "Best-selling Folk Records" and cycled through several names before becoming Hot Country Songs.

  The album chart predates many of the song charts. "Best Selling Popular Record Albums" first ran on the 24th of March 1945, with The King Cole Trio at number one on a list of ten albums. That initial list shrank to five albums in the weeks that followed, expanded back to ten in 1948, was split into separate 33-rpm and 45-rpm lists in 1950, recombined in 1954, split again into mono and stereo in 1959, and finally merged into a 150-item chart in 1963. It became the 200-album list on the 13th of May 1967.

  The genre album chart expansion followed a long calendar of launch dates: a Country LP chart in January 1964, an R&B chart in 1965, jazz in 1969, Latin in 1973, Gospel in 1974, and Rock in 1981. By the time internet charts arrived, Billboard was also tracking social media activity, TikTok performance, and discussions on X (formerly Twitter), measuring popularity across surfaces that did not exist when the first sheet music list ran in 1913.

• 6. The Greatest Artists Ranking

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  In 2015, Billboard compiled a ranking of the 125 best-performing artists over the 52 years of chart history from 1963 to 2015, drawing on combined point totals from both the Hot 100 and the Billboard 200. The Beatles ranked first. The Rolling Stones came second, followed by Elton John, Mariah Carey, and Madonna. Barbra Streisand ranked sixth, Michael Jackson seventh, Taylor Swift eighth, Stevie Wonder ninth, and Chicago tenth.

  The annual Billboard Music Awards, which recognized top performers across chart categories, ran between 1991 and 2006 before going dormant in 2007. The awards returned in May 2011. The first year-end chart issue covered the results of 1946, published in the 4th of January 1947 issue, though annual song listings had appeared in prior years, including an undifferentiated annual chart based on the Honor Roll of Hits for 1945. That Honor Roll of Hits was discontinued after the 16th of November 1963, having run since its introduction on the 24th of March 1945 as a ten-song list later expanded to thirty.