# American Top 40, But Why Not...? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 8, 2017, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107 "2017-05-08T01:53:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2017, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107/21 "2017-05-09T19:54:57Z")
> [@JohnGalt](#): > > Are these LPs available to collectors? It would seem like there would be thousands of them available, but eBay just shows a few out there. Were you instructed to destroy them at the end of each week? or mail them back? I’m not certain, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the stations weren’t supposed to distribute them (which makes that contest that I mentioned above more interesting). ISTR that, when my college radio station was running “Doctor Demento” in the 1980s, we were supposed to ship the LPs back to the network (Westwood One, I think). ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2017, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107/22 "2017-05-09T20:05:56Z")
> [@NDP](#): > > One thing I forget to mention in my last post is I’ve often wondered about the exact type of metric Billboard and the other charts used to measure a song’s popularity week-to-week. I’m aware they used record sales, radio airplay, radio requests, and (for a time) jukebox plays but, when they got done with the formulas and mathematics, was there a number at the end? The record charts aren’t like week box office reports or TV ratings where there are actual numbers (in form of dollars or viewers) attached to a movie or TV show. Thus, you don’t know how big a gap there is, for example between the #1 and #2 songs on any given week. While I’m certain that there was / is an actual number that their model would put out (which likely applied different weights to record sales, airplay, etc.), I don’t think that I’ve ever seen any chart rankings that provided anything other than the ordinal list. Each of those inputs was a meaningful number in and of itself (actual numbers of records sold, times played, etc.), but the blended number which would come out of their model wouldn’t be meaningful in the same way. For example, Song X is ranked #1, with a number of 5675, and Song Y is ranked #2, with a number of 5430, but most music fans (who don’t necessarily understand statistics or modeling) would ask, “5675 _what_?”, and there’s no real answer to that. ---
**Author:** ![Yodalicious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yodalicious/32/8195_2.png) [@Yodalicious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yodalicious)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2017, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107/23 "2017-05-09T22:23:41Z")
> [@Jinx](#): > > Since the bottom half of the American Top 40 countdown sucks so bad, why didn’t Casey Casem only bother with the Top 20? Could it be he needed the advertising over the full show to make the show profitable? Was he a slave to a greedy producer? What else could make a man suffer through such garbage when maybe only 3% rose from the dung heap into the Top 20? The majority of hits rocketed their way into the Top 20 immediately. So, what’s your theory? I bet you don’t want him to keep his feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars either. ---
**Author:** ![NDP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ndp/32/55_2.png) [@NDP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NDP)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2017, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107/24 "2017-05-10T17:55:01Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > While I’m certain that there was / is an actual number that their model would put out (which likely applied different weights to record sales, airplay, etc.), I don’t think that I’ve ever seen any chart rankings that provided anything other than the ordinal list. > > Each of those inputs was a meaningful number in and of itself (actual numbers of records sold, times played, etc.), but the blended number which would come out of their model wouldn’t be meaningful in the same way. For example, Song X is ranked #1, with a number of 5675, and Song Y is ranked #2, with a number of 5430, but most music fans (who don’t necessarily understand statistics or modeling) would ask, “5675 _what_?”, and there’s no real answer to that. I could understand why they wouldn’t bother to provide for laypeople like us the exact number that comes from the formula music charts use for each song but they also don’t do it for the Hot 100 chart published in Billboard and that’s a publication generally read only by music industry insiders. You would think there’d be some interest among those people in how the rankings on the chart break down. ---
**Author:** ![installLSC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/54ee81/32.png) [@installLSC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/installLSC)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2017, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107/25 "2017-05-11T02:19:01Z")
> [@NDP](#): > > One thing I forget to mention in my last post is I’ve often wondered about the exact type of metric Billboard and the other charts used to measure a song’s popularity week-to-week. I’m aware they used record sales, radio airplay, radio requests, and (for a time) jukebox plays but, when they got done with the formulas and mathematics, was there a number at the end? The record charts aren’t like week box office reports or TV ratings where there are actual numbers (in form of dollars or viewers) attached to a movie or TV show. Thus, you don’t know how big a gap there is, for example between the #1 and #2 songs on any given week. From the 50s to the 90s, Billboard used a mix of top 40 airplay and singles sales to calculate their singles charts. For all but the last few years of that stretch, Billboard only asked stations and retailers the ranking of their top singles–not the actual numbers sold or times played. So the reason Billboard didn’t list sales or airplay totals was probably it didn’t know the numbers. Back to the OP, from a book I read on the history of “American Top 40” Casey didn’t care all that much about music. He could talk your head off about vegetarianism, baseball, or politics but especially by the 80s really didn’t have much of an idea about the music scene. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2017, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107/26 "2017-05-11T03:36:29Z")
> [@Weisshund](#): > > I would guess he does not actually suffer through listening to all 40 or maybe even any of the songs > > And if the song made it to the top 40 out of all the songs released, it can’t be that terrible, at least to the mass majority I don’t think Kasem suffers through much of anything these days. ---
**Author:** ![Mr\_Downtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2017, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107/27 "2017-05-11T04:09:16Z")
My understanding is that well into the 1970s, maybe much later, Billboard’s Top 40 was compiled more impressionistically than scientifically. A couple of guys in the office would make a dozen phone calls each week to rack jobbers, jukebox operators, and radio music directors, asking what was getting lots of play, what was selling out, and what was new that people were asking for. From that meager sampling, they’d mysteriously come up with the Hot 100. Serious data analytics, as we now understand that concept, it wasn’t. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-top-40-but-why-not/786107.md?page=1)