Billboard
ipod with 37-minute sound work, 2005
The Billboard Hot 100 chart launched on August 4th, 1958 as an attempt to consolidate a variety of sales and radio airplay charts into a single pan-genre listing that could serve as a standard metric of success in popular music. The Hot 100 has been computed using a number of methodologies over the years, initially based on a combination of singles sales in target record stores and airplay on a number of commercial radio stations chosen by Billboard on a rotating basis. This resulted in the Hot 100 being a fairly ephemeral metric of popular success, with new singles reaching #1 on a regular (almost weekly basis). Because if its reliance on radio play and single sales in key markets, it was also susceptible to manipulation, either by manipulating disc jockey behavior (the payola scandal of 1959) or by inflating single sales at a record store known to be counted in Billboard rankings.
Since 1991, the chart has been computed by Nielsen based on their SoundScan sales-tracking technology. As of 1998, it is no longer necessary for a formal 'single' to be commercially available in order to qualify for charting; record labels can choose instead to release an 'airplay-only' single, allowing sales of the entire album to improve the chart status of a single song. The result of these two major shifts has been for record labels to use Billboard tactically, waiting to officially release a 'single' until several cuts of a record are in rotation on radio stations and in music television markets; this results in far fewer songs acheiving #1 status per year (e.g. 9 in 1996 versus 35 in 1975).
Billboard allows you to get a birds-eye view of the Billboard Hot 100 by listening to all the #1 singles from 1958 through the millenium using a technique I've been working on for a couple of years called time-lapse phonography. The 857 songs used to make the piece are analyzed digitally and a spectral average is then derived from the entire song. Just as a long camera exposure will fuse motion into a single image, spectral averaging allows us to look at the average sonority of a piece of music, however long, giving a sort of average timbre of a piece. This gives us a sense of the average key and register of the song, as well as some clues about the production values present at the time the record was made; for example, the improvements in home stereo equipment over the past fifty years, as well as the gradual replacement of (relatively low-fidelity) AM radio with FM broadcasting has had an impact on how records are mixed... drums and bass lines gradually become louder as you approach the present, increasing the amount of spectral noise and low tones in our averages.
The spectral average of each song used in Billboard plays for one second for each week it stayed at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Thus we run about 52 seconds per year, for a grand total of a 37 minute sound work. The video image tells you what song was used to generate the current spectral average. Note that nothing of the original recording is used in this piece; everything that you hear is derived from a statistical algorithm applied to the original recordings. If you know the song used in the average, you may be able to sing the first few bars (or the main hook in the chorus) over the spectral average and find that you are quite in tune with it; in some cases, you may be surprised not to be.
I feel that Billboard has an ancillary purpose of jogging our musical memory (or, for those of us who weren't alive when some of these songs were on the charts, jogging our expectations of popular music history). Many of what we consider seminal songs in pop history barely touched the charts: The Beatles' All You Need is Love spent only one week at #1 in 1967; the big hit that year was Lu Lu's To Sir With Love (5 weeks at #1). Similarly, many of what we consider to be important figures in late 20th-century popular music never charted. Many of them never released singles (e.g. Bob Dylan) or never courted commercial radio-play (e.g. Led Zeppelin, REM, Metallica, Nirvana). Most were simply never integrated into the mainstream commercial marketing system necessary for chart success, despite having huge followings and album sales; artists as diverse as Public Enemy and 10,000 Maniacs, both 'multi-platinum' groups, fall into this category.
While all of this may sound like a standard lesson in the fickleness of popular music, it's attractive to think that all of this has an effect on the 'sound' of a #1 hit. If there is such a thing as a 'hit sound' (as many a record producer and A&R executive has claimed, from George Martin to Ahmet Ertegun to Russell Simmons), perhaps we could hear it change from year to year.
Enjoy.
