As a bonafide chart geek, there are some important things to remember:
The Hot 100 only measures a song’s popularity during its original hit run. So if you’re wondering why “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Dancing Queen” aren’t higher, that’s because most of their popularity postdates their original chart run.
Chart runs became a lot longer after the 80s, due to better monitoring of airplay/sales and radio becoming much slower in dropping hit songs. So anything 90s and later will have an unfair advantage.
The Hot 100 has always had a lot of flaws. They’ve never measured sales of albums or music video play to figure a song’s popularity. Until fairly recently, non-top 40 airplay wasn’t used. And Billboard has been as helpless as the rest of music industry in figuring out to how to measure YouTube/Spotify play correctly. So treat these lists with massive grains of salt.
The list IMHO includes a lot of songs that are pretty good. There are a lot that I wouldn’t put on my Spotify playlist though. And older songs are massively unrepresented; they include some excellent ones and some mediocrities.
These lists are not going to satisfy everyone. I feel the 80s and 90s, Jazz, and non-English music are underrepresented. The You Tube factor skews things as well — Despacito, for example, is a decent song but I could easily think of several better Spanish songs which I prefer.
Well, you know, post #80 kinda dealt with that…
I thought I saw that post, but I don’t see the actual methodology laid out there in the link. Am I missing something? There’s just some vague words I see there, but nothing where, say, the kids playing at home can tally up the scores themselves. That’s what I mean when I want to see “methodology.” (ETA: And that’s a list to a different ranking, isn’t it? Am I going crazy here? What does that have to do with the list in the OP? That has to do with artists, and not songs.)
Bolding mine.
While we cannot know the exact points system, it appears that, unless they added points for being #1 (which appears unlikely from the results), then each week at #1 was worth 100 pts, each week at #2 was worth 99 points, etc. There appears to have been a multiplier of some sort applied to times when the chart didn’t see heavy song turnover. I would guess this is certainly true of later years (the 2000s), where songs have tended to stay at #1 longer.
But the paragraph certainly gives us enough to go on to understand why a song that spent relatively little time at #1 might have finished high on the list; longevity will be prized over short-term fame.
Gonna bump this one for all the Billboard chart nerdz - today is the 30th Anniversary of Billboard integrating SoundScan into the rankings, completely changing people’s understanding of what was really popular… and not.
There’s a pretty good article in The Ringer about this: