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Top Comments: Fixing the charts? [1]
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Date: 2025-07-25
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I am about to divulge a little secret of mine.
Nearly everyone knows that I am a devoted data geek when it comes to college football and I’ve been that way since before I was a teenager; in fact, that love of data and statistics extended into most sports for a period of...oh, about 10 or so years. I still have a passion for college football data-geeking out but not much else, not even the National Football League.
For roughly a five-year period in the mid to late 1980’s, I was as much of a data geek of the music charts.
I was a faithful listener to Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 40, the popular radio show that was based on the Billboard Music’s Hot 100 but it went waaaaaay beyond that. I became so fascinated with the movements of songs up and down the charts that I went to the library every week to read Billboard magazine to look at the various movements on the music charts with an emphasis on Billboard’s Hot 100, the R&B charts, and the British charts. So I wonder why, for example, a perfectly good song like Diana Ross’ Chain Reaction hit the Top of the British charts by received very very little airplay on American radio (I would love to see Beyoncé do a remake of Chain Reaction).
Well...I know a little more about how and which songs are promoted overseas vs. the United States. I know some of the reasons why Tina Turner retained her European popularity throughout the years right up to her death.
I was reminded of much material that I hadn’t thought about in years when I read a Substack post by Chris Dalla Riva, who shared an excerpt from his new book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, speculating whether the Billboard Music Charts and specifically the Hot 100 were rigged for a period of time.
From labels run by the mob to shady artist contracts, there has always been a degree of corruption lurking in the music business. Of course, corruption lurks in every industry, but music industry corruption is partially driven by the fact that it’s a hits-driven business. [...] In Figure 5.1, you can see that between 1958 and 1970, number ones typically spent two to three weeks atop the charts. There was variation, but one-week chart-toppers were not common, only occurring about 27 percent of the time. Then things changed. By the middle of the 1970s, the average time atop the charts fell close to 1.5 weeks with nearly 50 percent of number ones between 1970 and 1977 only leading the chart for a single week. [...] At the same time, when songs were losing the top spot, they were falling farther down the charts than ever before. For example, Andy Kim’s “Rock Me Gently” (September 28, 1974), a joyous record that you could mistake for the best of Neil Diamond, and Stevie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” (November 2, 1974), a Richard-Nixon-protest-track, each fell from number one to number 12 in a single week. Similarly, Billy Preston’s soulful jam “Nothing From Nothing” (October 19, 1974) and Dionne Warwick and The Spinners duet “Then Came You” (October 26, 1974) fell from number one to number 15 in a single week. When you look at the average fall from number one, it becomes clear that these weren’t aberrations.
(Ohhhhhhhh...Billy Preston, I don’t think that I’ve heard that song since I was a kid.)
Do read the rest of Dalla Riva’s Substack post on who may have been involved in the fixing of the music charts in the 1970’s and why.
In the meantime, I may have to get this book to geek out again.
For old time’s sake.
Comments below the fold.
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