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).
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 bet you don’t want him to keep his feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars either.
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.
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.
I don’t think Kasem suffers through much of anything these days.
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.