Billboard's Hot 100

[CTListener]

It was also brought up by Michael in one of the past threads (way back) that it would be worse for a station to play a song people recognize but dislike, rather than to play one they don't recognize.

Just to be clear, neither is as good an option as playing a song with high recognition and low negatives.

For me, high recognition can be a negative.

(They're playing that song? Again?)

And it's been shown ever since the Top 40 format began that that sort of listener is a very, very small minority. The stations that get the best ratings playing any mainstream genre of music have tight playlists with saturation airplay of songs with high positives. You and I might not like that kind of radio, but the average listener has been proven time after time to love it.

 

[oldies76]

And it's been shown ever since the Top 40 format began that that sort of listener is a very, very small minority. The stations that get the best ratings playing any mainstream genre of music have tight playlists with saturation airplay of songs with high positives. You and I might not like that kind of radio, but the average listener has been proven time after time to love it.

Que Sera, Sera, Sera...............

 

[amfmsw]

The AT40 "Extra"s, and other features in DC's "Rock Roll & Remember", "Weekly Country Countdown", Rick Dee's and others may seem to slow it down, but are crucial saviors to the small market station carriers. They're fillers for unsold time. Without them, the show would end at, oh, maybe 4 or 6 or 10 minutes before the hour. They keep each segment an "honest hour" long for traffic. If the time is sold, they could drop the option. OR if the traffic dept goofed in their calculations of local avails, and the board op had time to fill at the end of the hour, or show, they could always grab the discs and play the "extra" to fill the hour and get him back on track.

Nothing more frightening to a first time Sunday morning operator than running that show, and its the end of the first hour...at 7:56am. what ya gonn do at the endd of 3 more short hours? TALK?

Gawd forbid...the owner said don't ddo that!

 

[firepoint525]

I worked at a small country AM station back in the early '90s, which at the time carried the Crook & Chase countdown on Saturday evenings. It was a four-hour countdown, and I noticed that if I played it straight through, it would end about 15 minutes early. After I had had enough of that, I started carrying the network news at the top of every hour to stay on track. The PD told me that "it wasn't designed to be done that way" or some other such nonsense, but I told him, "if you don't want me to do that, then sell the airtime." (Like that was ever gonna happen! :) I once filled in for the guy who took my place (on that shift), and he carried the countdown the way that they wanted it done. Since I was filling that shift, I did it my way. I figured that if the GM wanted to bitch about me carrying network news at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday, then he could find some other fool to work for him! (The countdown had run late due to high school basketball the previous evening, and the station pumped out a whopping 54 watts at night!)

(We also carried Lee Arnold's program On a Country Road (or something like that), and it contained a five-minute extra segment to be played at the top of every hour, but only by stations that did not carry network news.)

 

[firepoint525]

It was also brought up by Michael in one of the past threads (way back) that it would be worse for a station to play a song people recognize but dislike, rather than to play one they don't recognize.

Just to be clear, neither is as good an option as playing a song with high recognition and low negatives.

For me, high recognition can be a negative.
(They're playing that song? Again?)

And it's been shown ever since the Top 40 format began that that sort of listener is a very, very small minority. The stations that get the best ratings playing any mainstream genre of music have tight playlists with saturation airplay of songs with high positives. You and I might not like that kind of radio, but the average listener has been proven time after time to love it.

It's time to bust this notion that "they" are somehow different than "we" are. This is what has been killing radio (slowly) for years. I post on non-radio boards, and whenever the discussion of radio comes up (initiated by others, not by me), they have the same complaints that we do. The stupid morning talk shows, the excessive commercials, the same handful of songs over and over and over again (if they even still play music in the mornings) :. Next time you go in for a haircut, ask the barber (or other stylist) what they think of the radio station that they have piped in. Then sit back and wait for the same complaints that you have seen here.

FM radio is slowly going the way that AM radio went. AM radio is dead, and FM has one foot in the grave. Some of this is inevitable, but what happened is that AM programming was just brought over to FM, only with better sound quality.

When we measure radio's ratings, we are only measuring how well they are doing when compared to the other stations in the market. What we are not measuring is how radio is doing when compared to, say, listening to our own music collections. I would imagine that the top-rated stations now are not as highly-rated as they were 20-30 years or so ago. Too much competition from the internet, satellite radio, and other choices.

 

[OldNumber7]

It was also brought up by Michael in one of the past threads (way back) that it would be worse for a station to play a song people recognize but dislike, rather than to play one they don't recognize.

Just to be clear, neither is as good an option as playing a song with high recognition and low negatives.

For me, high recognition can be a negative.
(They're playing that song? Again?)

And it's been shown ever since the Top 40 format began that that sort of listener is a very, very small minority. The stations that get the best ratings playing any mainstream genre of music have tight playlists with saturation airplay of songs with high positives. You and I might not like that kind of radio, but the average listener has been proven time after time to love it.

It's time to bust this notion that "they" are somehow different than "we" are. This is what has been killing radio (slowly) for years. I post on non-radio boards, and whenever the discussion of radio comes up (initiated by others, not by me), they have the same complaints that we do. The stupid morning talk shows, the excessive commercials, the same handful of songs over and over and over again (if they even still play music in the mornings) :. Next time you go in for a haircut, ask the barber (or other stylist) what they think of the radio station that they have piped in. Then sit back and wait for the same complaints that you have seen here.

FM radio is slowly going the way that AM radio went. AM radio is dead, and FM has one foot in the grave. Some of this is inevitable, but what happened is that AM programming was just brought over to FM, only with better sound quality.

When we measure radio's ratings, we are only measuring how well they are doing when compared to the other stations in the market. What we are not measuring is how radio is doing when compared to, say, listening to our own music collections. I would imagine that the top-rated stations now are not as highly-rated as they were 20-30 years or so ago. Too much competition from the internet, satellite radio, and other choices.

Radio is only as interesting and engaging as its listeners. The masses have spoken (over and over again) that successful stations must play the same songs over and over again. A friend, radio vet no less, bitched during the holidays that his favorite oldies and AC stations had gone all holiday music. I suggested he tune in the very hip and cool noncommercial AAA station for a refreshing fix. But he said it wasn't mainstream enough. He'd rather slog through a month of Christmas music he hated than tune in to a station playing very fresh contemporary "untested" tunes. The lesson is cume records are cume records. And the station known for playing cume records is perceived as better that a station playing non-cume stuff even when the cume station deviates from its own format!!!!

 

[firepoint525]

Radio is only as interesting and engaging as its listeners. The masses have spoken (over and over again) that successful stations must play the same songs over and over again. A friend, radio vet no less, bitched during the holidays that his favorite oldies and AC stations had gone all holiday music. I suggested he tune in the very hip and cool noncommercial AAA station for a refreshing fix. But he said it wasn't mainstream enough. He'd rather slog through a month of Christmas music he hated than tune in to a station playing very fresh contemporary "untested" tunes. The lesson is cume records are cume records. And the station known for playing cume records is perceived as better that a station playing non-cume stuff even when the cume station deviates from its own format!!!!

I can feel his pain. Well, kinda sorta. About 10 years or so ago, on a local message board in a discussion about radio, someone suggested that we check out the Americana station that was on the air here in town at that time. I did, and I liked it! But sadly, their owners sold it about six months later. :'(

The AAA station here (which owned the Americana station that I just mentioned above) is not as hip as maybe they once were. They are fairly good about playing local music, but I have noticed that even they have become too repetitive for my taste, as well as playing too much Jason Mraz, John Mayer, Dave Matthews Band, etc. Basically, they just play the same songs that the AC station plays, before the AC station starts playing them.

 

[firepoint525]

The ultimate expression of that approach came in the 70s, when albums began to "ship Platinum". The record label would press a million copies and ship them in week one. Billboard would report the album as debuting Platinum (with a correspondingly high chart number). Record store owners would order up big. Trouble was, often those records wouldn't sell to real customers. In nine months, the majority would be quietly shipped back to the label, melted down and the vinyl recycled. The "Sgt. Pepper" movie soundtrack of 1978 is probably the most notorious example. So few of those sold at retail that the joke in the industry was that it "shipped Platinum and returned double Platinum". Very likely only 100,000 or so copies sold. But if you look at Billboard back issues or the Joel Whitburn books based on the Billboard charts, you see a #1 album that sold more than a million copies (in its news pages, Billboard dutifully reported on returns, but only on an industry-wide basis, every few months...never mentioning labels, artists or specific records by name).

Revisiting this one, since it was posted on a day that I was not here: ;D

Is it possible that maybe expectations for the Sgt. Pepper album were just simply too high? After all, this was the BeeGees' "followup" to Saturday Night Fever. And the Gibbs could do no wrong in 1978. Or so it seemed. And I seem to recall that the reviews for the movie were absolutely terrible! Which probably accounted for why that project was such a flop.

I wish that there was a way to not only track returns, but to also follow whatever ended up in consignment stores, sold at yard sales, or just simply in landfills! ;D That might give you more of a truer indication of what truly was a "hit" or not. It would definitely give you more of an indication of what had "staying power."

And on a somewhat related note, does anyone remember the episode of AT40 from about March of 1977 (I think) when Casey made an announcement which "corrected" some of the positions of songs that he had aired earlier in the program? I believe he was into the top 10 at the time he made these "corrections." Not only did I remember that particular countdown airing back then, I heard it again last year, when it reaired as a "retro" countdown. Apparently, it was too close to airtime (or maybe they had already gone into production) to fix these issues before the countdown was shipped to stations. At any rate, based on how meaningless that these chart positions supposedly were, why go to all the trouble of making a "correction" to these numbers anyway, if they were as bogus as we now have been led to believe? (Kinda hoping that this one will reair again next month, to give any of you who missed it, a chance to hear it again for the first time. ;D)

 

[michael hagerty]

It was also brought up by Michael in one of the past threads (way back) that it would be worse for a station to play a song people recognize but dislike, rather than to play one they don't recognize.

Just to be clear, neither is as good an option as playing a song with high recognition and low negatives.

For me, high recognition can be a negative.
(They're playing that song? Again?)

And it's been shown ever since the Top 40 format began that that sort of listener is a very, very small minority. The stations that get the best ratings playing any mainstream genre of music have tight playlists with saturation airplay of songs with high positives. You and I might not like that kind of radio, but the average listener has been proven time after time to love it.

It's time to bust this notion that "they" are somehow different than "we" are. This is what has been killing radio (slowly) for years. I post on non-radio boards, and whenever the discussion of radio comes up (initiated by others, not by me), they have the same complaints that we do. The stupid morning talk shows, the excessive commercials, the same handful of songs over and over and over again (if they even still play music in the mornings) :. Next time you go in for a haircut, ask the barber (or other stylist) what they think of the radio station that they have piped in. Then sit back and wait for the same complaints that you have seen here.

FM radio is slowly going the way that AM radio went. AM radio is dead, and FM has one foot in the grave. Some of this is inevitable, but what happened is that AM programming was just brought over to FM, only with better sound quality.

When we measure radio's ratings, we are only measuring how well they are doing when compared to the other stations in the market. What we are not measuring is how radio is doing when compared to, say, listening to our own music collections. I would imagine that the top-rated stations now are not as highly-rated as they were 20-30 years or so ago. Too much competition from the internet, satellite radio, and other choices.

Radio is only as interesting and engaging as its listeners. The masses have spoken (over and over again) that successful stations must play the same songs over and over again. A friend, radio vet no less, bitched during the holidays that his favorite oldies and AC stations had gone all holiday music. I suggested he tune in the very hip and cool noncommercial AAA station for a refreshing fix. But he said it wasn't mainstream enough. He'd rather slog through a month of Christmas music he hated than tune in to a station playing very fresh contemporary "untested" tunes. The lesson is cume records are cume records. And the station known for playing cume records is perceived as better that a station playing non-cume stuff even when the cume station deviates from its own format!!!!

Exactly.

The key to success is understanding that how listeners behave is sometimes diametrically opposed to what they say. And now that listening measures behavior and not recall, it's critical to identify, understand and respond to the behaviors.

 

[michael hagerty]

The ultimate expression of that approach came in the 70s, when albums began to "ship Platinum". The record label would press a million copies and ship them in week one. Billboard would report the album as debuting Platinum (with a correspondingly high chart number). Record store owners would order up big. Trouble was, often those records wouldn't sell to real customers. In nine months, the majority would be quietly shipped back to the label, melted down and the vinyl recycled. The "Sgt. Pepper" movie soundtrack of 1978 is probably the most notorious example. So few of those sold at retail that the joke in the industry was that it "shipped Platinum and returned double Platinum". Very likely only 100,000 or so copies sold. But if you look at Billboard back issues or the Joel Whitburn books based on the Billboard charts, you see a #1 album that sold more than a million copies (in its news pages, Billboard dutifully reported on returns, but only on an industry-wide basis, every few months...never mentioning labels, artists or specific records by name).

Revisiting this one, since it was posted on a day that I was not here: ;D

Is it possible that maybe expectations for the Sgt. Pepper album were just simply too high? After all, this was the BeeGees' "followup" to Saturday Night Fever. And the Gibbs could do no wrong in 1978. Or so it seemed. And I seem to recall that the reviews for the movie were absolutely terrible! Which probably accounted for why that project was such a flop.

Yes, but it doesn't matter why. RSO was following what had become an industry practice to rack up the highest debut number possible...shipping platinum. The idea was to jolt record store owners (who tended to forget that Billboard measured wholesale) into doubling and tripling their usual orders ("this thing's gonna be HUGE!"). And there were already stories of it backfiring. The "Sgt. Pepper" soundtrack was just the biggest.

I wish that there was a way to not only track returns, but to also follow whatever ended up in consignment stores, sold at yard sales, or just simply in landfills! ;D That might give you more of a truer indication of what truly was a "hit" or not. It would definitely give you more of an indication of what had "staying power."

A start would have been for Billboard to be open about what its charts did and did not measure when they began to reach a consumer audience through AT40, Whitburn and Bronson. But that would likely have made them less valuable.

Billboard could have (after the fact) reported on returns. The stores and distributors stuck with hundreds of thousands of copies of stiffs would have gladly furnished the real numbers. But Billboard's bread and butter was advertising from the labels. A month-long boycott from the majors could have done real damage. And the public didn't read the 127 pages of Billboard where that story would have run.

Here's the thing: Who really needed to know? Record store owners knew what they were and weren't selling. Radio stations (ones that took programming seriously, anyway) didn't use the Billboard charts. Retail sales (and through research, the listeners themselves) told us what was a hit...and for how long.

The problem (and it's the core of this thread) is that the Billboard charts are misunderstood by the public as having been something they weren't pre-Soundscan.

And on a somewhat related note, does anyone remember the episode of AT40 from about March of 1977 (I think) when Casey made an announcement which "corrected" some of the positions of songs that he had aired earlier in the program? I believe he was into the top 10 at the time he made these "corrections." Not only did I remember that particular countdown airing back then, I heard it again last year, when it reaired as a "retro" countdown. Apparently, it was too close to airtime (or maybe they had already gone into production) to fix these issues before the countdown was shipped to stations. At any rate, based on how meaningless that these chart positions supposedly were, why go to all the trouble of making a "correction" to these numbers anyway, if they were as bogus as we now have been led to believe? (Kinda hoping that this one will reair again next month, to give any of you who missed it, a chance to hear it again for the first time. ;D)

I remember it.

In order to record AT40 and get it shipped to stations, Watermark had to get the Billboard Hot 100 before it went to print. Literally as soon as the tabulations were complete, a phone call took place and someone at Billboard read the new numbers down the phone to someone at Watermark who either wrote them or typed them. And that week, one or both screwed up.

Why bother correcting? Well, at this point AT40 had 7 years and millions of dollars invested in telling the public that their countdown was the most accurate list of "the most popular records in America this week, as tabulated by Billboard magazine" (given that the chart measured wholesale orders, that line probably wouldn't get past Watermark's or the affiliates' lawyers today). And millions of budding chart freaks spotted the discrepancies when the new issue of Billboard got to the local record store.

It was simply a credibility issue...and potentially very damaging at the time.

Again, you have to go back to my initial post in this thread. Bogus is the wrong word. The pre-Soundscan Billboard charts measured wholesale shipments by record labels to distributors and record stores. And in that sense, it was accurate. But if it didn't tell you what was actually popular (and just how popular) with record buyers in 1973, it doesn't make much of a base for anything relating to those same records 40 years later.

 

[cd637299]

I also recall that early '77 AT40. Two songs involved were "Sam" by Olivia Newton-John and "Bite Your Lip" by Elton John. I think those were the only ones. "Sam" ended up peaking higher.

cd

 

[rnigma1]

My first radio job was working Sunday mornings and running all the public affairs and religious shows the station buried there to satisfy soon-to-be-dumped FCC regs. AT40 ran at the end of the shift from 10 am to 2 pm. I recall getting an autographed pic of Casey from Watermark; whether Casey actually signed it, I dunno. And yes, I had to pad out each hour so the show would end on time. The engineer or the PD cobbled together an intro with Kasem's voice: "And now, an AT40 extra...on 97 Rock." I played that before firing up the filler song.
Later, the station added Countdown America (when John Leader was host) and aired it in addition to AT40; when Dick Clark took over that show, it was replaced with Scott Shannon's countdown show, because the PD had no fondness for Clark.

 

[firepoint525]

To me, the best indicator of how a song was doing in any given area would have been on the local station's own charts. The station in the town where I grew up occasionally made reference to such a local chart, but never presented a countdown based on such a chart. The only such chart that I ever saw was in the local Gibson's Discount Center, but it has been so long that I don't remember much about it. For all I can remember, it may have been nothing more than an alphabetical listing of all the 45s that they had that week.

If the local station in that town had truly represented the tastes of those of us who lived there at the time, they probably would have played a LOT more local bands, and a lot less of the national stuff. There were some local bands there that had a pretty good following, but I seldom, if ever, heard their music played on the radio. At the same time, I feel like many of us just sort of "tolerated" the national trends going on at the time. We certainly never embraced those trends in any major way.

Of course, stations in the bigger cities had their own charts, and published them, too. Assuming that no money was passed under the table, these were probably the best representations of whatever was going on there, musically, at that time.

 

[firepoint525]

My first radio job was working Sunday mornings and running all the public affairs and religious shows the station buried there to satisfy soon-to-be-dumped FCC regs. AT40 ran at the end of the shift from 10 am to 2 pm. I recall getting an autographed pic of Casey from Watermark; whether Casey actually signed it, I dunno. And yes, I had to pad out each hour so the show would end on time. The engineer or the PD cobbled together an intro with Kasem's voice: "And now, an AT40 extra...on 97 Rock." I played that before firing up the filler song.
Later, the station added Countdown America (when John Leader was host) and aired it in addition to AT40; when Dick Clark took over that show, it was replaced with Scott Shannon's countdown show, because the PD had no fondness for Clark.

My local AT40 affiliate station carried the network news at the top of the hour (UPI at the time, I think) up until the first commercial break, then went into AT40. They may have even given a brief weather forecast before (re)joining the countdown.

Different stations obviously had different policies, but I can't help but think that most stations would have had no problem filling the available ad time with spots, if only they had carried the countdown at a sensible time. No advertiser wants to buy a spot that is only going to air at 3:00 a.m.!

If you were an especially shy dj (or if your station had a policy against letting you talk during the countdown), then an extra "filler" song would definitely have been the way to go. Nowadays, with automation, airing the extra song may be the only way to go!

 

[semoochie]

I should mention somewhere that I was completely unaware that Billboard didn't incorporate airplay into the Hot 100 prior to the late 1970s. That's about the time I started checking the charts in earnest. I always thought it was a combination of "reported" airplay, sales and jukebox play. It was my impression that the stations themselves, based their playlists on local record sales, requests and the national charts.

 

[RIN3GUY]

I would like to know the month and year they started doing this. It would affect the way I look at my Whitburn books. I would also like to know how much weight was given to airplay vs. sales.

 

[michael hagerty]

I would like to know the month and year they started doing this. It would affect the way I look at my Whitburn books. I would also like to know how much weight was given to airplay vs. sales.

I should be able to get that information tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon.

 

[michael hagerty]

I should mention somewhere that I was completely unaware that Billboard didn't incorporate airplay into the Hot 100 prior to the late 1970s. That's about the time I started checking the charts in earnest. I always thought it was a combination of "reported" airplay, sales and jukebox play. It was my impression that the stations themselves, based their playlists on local record sales, requests and the national charts.

For a long time, jukebox play was its own chart. I'll try to get a date range on that.

Stations differed, but most successful ones didn't really look at the national charts. It was local sales, requests and research.

 

[davideduardo]

I should mention somewhere that I was completely unaware that Billboard didn't incorporate airplay into the Hot 100 prior to the late 1970s. That's about the time I started checking the charts in earnest. I always thought it was a combination of "reported" airplay, sales and jukebox play. It was my impression that the stations themselves, based their playlists on local record sales, requests and the national charts.

Remember a couple of things...

... until there was electronic monitoring decades later, airplay reports came from the stations and consisted of moves, adds and drops. Many of those reports were either "off the cuff" or influenced by other factors.

... stations generally did not use the Billboard charts once radio-centric publications like Gavin, FMQB, R&R, etc. come on the scene. They did not pay much attention to the charts, but to what other stations were moving on.

 

[semoochie]

I have a question: If the Hot 100 was a reflection of wholesale only, how do you account for the chart positions of B-sides?