What's the Point of the Billboard Charts?

Determining the most popular song is a more dangerous game than it seems.

Typically, any week you look at the Billboard Hot 100 - the music industry’s premier pop chart - you see the hottest new music. But that’s not what I saw this week. I saw Brenda Lee’s holiday classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” sitting at the top.

Over the last few years, we’ve begun to see Christmas songs dominate the pop charts each December. Decades ago, this did not happen. Here, for example, is the top of the Hot 100 during the week of December 12, 1985. No Christmas songs in sight. This week, I want to talk about what the Billboard charts are, why they are important, and how they are deceptive.

Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 during the week of December 12, 1985

Before delving into that, if you have any music lovers in your life, you can give them a subscription to this newsletter for the holidays. You can even schedule the gift to be sent on Christmas! On top of the four free posts that I send out every month, paid subscribers get at least four additional posts, along with access to my archive.

The Most “Popular” Song on the Charts

In the early 1960s, Thomas Khun published The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, an influential book that rethought how science works and scientific knowledge grows. In the middle of that book, Khun writes a fascinating passage about how infants use language, which he ultimately connects back to the history of science:

The child who transfers the word ‘mama’ from all humans to all females and then to his mother is not just learning what ‘mama’ means or who his mother is. Simultaneously he is learning some of the differences between males and females as well as something about the ways in which all but one female will behave toward him. His reactions, expectations, and beliefs—indeed, much of his perceived world—change accordingly.

What Khun is capturing is that as a child develops, they might use the same word to mean very different things. For example, when a one-year-old child says “mama”, they likely aren’t using it in the same way that a nine-year-old child is. Khun connects this to how we keep using the same scientific terms - like “gravity” - even though the meaning underlying those terms has changed radically over the centuries.

Before I bore you with too much detail on the history of science, I want to note that the thing we refer to as the Billboard Hot 100 fits a similar model. The Hot 100 was created in 1958 and remains in use to this day, but it is really only the same in name. The underlying mechanics are radically different.

Billboard’s first magazine, published in November 1894

When Billboard was first published in 1894 it was a trade magazine “devoted to the interests of advertisers, poster printers, bill posters, advertising agents & secretaries of fairs.” Over time, Billboard began to cover entertainment before focusing almost exclusively on music in the 1930s.

In the 1940s, Billboard developed popular music charts to help inform industry executives, jukebox operators, and radio personalities on what people wanted to hear. Industry insiders soon pressed for a chart that aggregated all listening data in one place. Seymour Stein - a young Billboard employee at the time who would later go on to help launch the careers of the Talking Heads and Madonna - described the beginnings of that aggregate chart, namely the Hot 100, in 2015:

Back then, jukebox sales were enormous. If a hot artist, like Perry Como, Patti Page or Nat ‘King’ Cole, with a successful track record put out a new single, record stores knew how to order based on their recent sales. But, in the case of new artists, and there were a lot of them in those early days of rock & roll, stores had no way of being guided. More urgently, jukebox operators needed to know quickly to get these new records into their machines.

In short, Billboard was trying to determine the most popular song to specifically inform the music industry. And that “inform the music industry” point was important. Billboard spent decades as a relatively niche trade press. You couldn’t pick up a copy of Billboard at your local convenience store in the same way you can’t pick up a waste and recycling trade magazine at your local convenience store. Even so, determining the most popular music specifically to inform the music industry was difficult and sometimes controversial.