Jump to navigation Jump to search Song chart in U. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. The Billboard Hot 100 is the music industry standard record chart in top ten candy bars United States for songs, published weekly by Billboard magazine.

The weekly tracking period for sales was initially Monday to Sunday when Nielsen started tracking sales in 1991, but was changed to Friday to Thursday in July 2015. This tracking period also applies to compiling online streaming data. The first number-one song of the Billboard Hot 100 was “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson, on August 4, 1958. As of the issue for the week ending on January 14, 2023, the Billboard Hot 100 has had 1,144 different number-one entries. The first chart published by Billboard was “Last Week’s Ten Best Sellers Among the Popular Songs”, a list of best-selling sheet music, in July 1913. Other charts listed popular song performances in theatres and recitals.

In 1928, “Popular Numbers Featured by Famous Singers and Leaders” appeared, which added radio performances to in-person performances. Best Sellers in Stores was the best seller chart first established in July 1940. This was one of the main outlets of measuring song popularity with the younger generation of music listeners, as many radio stations resisted adding rock and roll music to their playlists for many years. Although officially all three charts had equal “weight” in terms of their importance, Billboard retrospectively considers the Best Sellers in Stores chart when referencing a song’s performance before the creation of the Hot 100. On the week ending November 12, 1955, Billboard published The Top 100 for the first time.

On June 17, 1957, Billboard discontinued the Most Played in Jukeboxes chart, as the popularity of jukeboxes waned and radio stations incorporated more and more rock-oriented music into their playlists. On August 4, 1958, Billboard premiered one main all-genre singles chart: the Hot 100, with “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson its first No. Stein does not recall who chose the name. The Billboard Hot 100 is still the standard by which a song’s popularity is measured in the United States. There are several component charts that contribute to the overall calculation of the Hot 100. The chart is released weekly and measures sales of physical commercial singles.

The methods and policies by which this data is obtained and compiled have changed many times throughout the chart’s history. As the decades passed, the recording industry concentrated more on album sales than singles sales. Eventually, a song’s airplay points were weighted more so than its sales. Billboard has also changed its Hot 100 policy regarding “two-sided singles” several times. This started to become a moot point by 1972, as most major record labels solidified a trend they had started in the 1960s by putting the same song on both sides of the singles provided to radio. More complex issues began to arise as the typical A-and-B-side format of singles gave way to 12 inch singles and maxi-singles, many of which contained more than one B-side. Further problems arose when, in several cases, a B-side would eventually overtake the A-side in popularity, thus prompting record labels to release a new single, featuring the former B-side as the A-side, along with a “new” B-side.