Billboard charts

The Billboard charts tabulate the relative weekly popularity of songs or albums in the United States and elsewhere. The results are published in Billboard magazine. Billboard biz, the online extension of the Billboard charts, provides additional weekly charts. There are also Year End charts.

History, methods and description

On January 4, 1936, Billboard magazine published its first music hit parade. The first Music Popularity Chart was calculated in July 1940. A variety of song charts followed, which were eventually consolidated into the Hot 100 by mid-1958. The Hot 100 currently combines single sales, radio airplay, digital downloads, and streaming activity (including data from YouTube and other video sites). All of the Billboard charts use this basic formula. What separates the charts is which stations and stores are used; each musical genre has a core audience or retail group. Each genre's department at Billboard is headed up by a chart manager, who makes these determinations.

Top 40

Top 40 is a music industry shorthand for the currently most-popular songs in a particular genre. When used without qualification it refers to the best-selling or most frequently broadcast popular music. The term is derived from record music charts, a few of which traditionally consist of a total of 40 songs. Top 40 is also an alternative term for the radio format of such music, also known as Contemporary hit radio.

History

The term "Top 40" for a radio format appeared in 1960. The Top 40, whether surveyed by a radio station or a publication, was a list of songs that shared only the common characteristic of being newly released. Its introduction coincided with a transition from the old ten-inch shellac 78 rpm record format for single "pop" recordings to the seven-inch vinyl 45 rpm format, introduced in 1949, which was outselling it by 1954 and soon replaced it completely. The Top 40 thereafter became a survey of the popularity of 45 rpm singles and their airplay on the radio. Some nationally syndicated radio shows, like American Top 40, featured a countdown of the forty highest ranked songs on a particular music or entertainment publication. Although such publications often listed more than 40 charted hits, such as the Billboard Hot 100, time constraints allowed for the airing of only forty songs; hence, the term "top 40" gradually became part of the vernacular associated with popular music.

Contemporary hit radio

Contemporary hit radio (also known as CHR, contemporary hits, hit list, current hits, hit music, top 40, or pop radio) is a radio format that is common in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia that focuses on playing current and recurrent popular music as determined by the top 40 music charts. There are several subcategories, dominantly focusing on rock, pop, or urban music. Used alone, CHR most often refers to the CHR-pop format. The term contemporary hit radio was coined in the early 1980s by Radio & Records magazine to designate top 40 stations which continued to play hits from all musical genres as pop music splintered into adult contemporary, urban contemporary and other formats.

The term "top 40" is also used to refer to the actual list of hit songs, and, by extension, to refer to pop music in general. The term has also been modified to describe top 50; top 30; top 20; top 10; hot 100 (each with its number of songs) and hot hits radio formats, but carrying more or less the same meaning and having the same creative point of origin with Todd Storz as further refined by Gordon McLendon as well as Bill Drake. The format became especially popular in the sixties as radio stations constrained disc jockeys to numbered play lists in the wake of the payola scandal.

Billboard Hot 100

The Billboard Hot 100 is the music industry standard record chart in the United States for singles, published weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play, online streaming, and sales (physical and digital).

The weekly sales period was originally Monday to Sunday when Nielsen started tracking sales in 1991, but since July 2015, this has been changed from Friday to Thursday. Radio airplay, which unlike sales figures and streaming data, is readily available on a real-time basis and is tracked on a Monday to Sunday cycle (it was previously Wednesday to Tuesday). A new chart is compiled and officially released to the public by Billboard on Tuesdays. Example:

Billboard 200

The Billboard 200 is a record chart ranking the 200 highest-ranking music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists. Often, a recording act will be remembered by its "number ones", those of their albums that outperformed all others during at least one week.

The chart is based mostly on sales (both at retail and digitally) of albums in the United States. The weekly sales period was originally Monday to Sunday when Nielsen started tracking sales in 1991, but since July 2015, tracking week begins on Friday (to coincide with the Global Release Date of the music industry) and ends on Thursday. A new chart is published the following Tuesday with an issue post-dated to the Saturday of the following week. The chart's streaming schedule is also tracked from Friday to Thursday.

New product is released to the American market on Fridays. Digital downloads of albums are also included in Billboard 200 tabulation. Albums that are not licensed for retail sale in the United States (yet purchased in the U.S. as imports) are not eligible to chart. A long-standing policy which made titles that are sold exclusively by specific retail outlets (such as Walmart and Starbucks) ineligible for charting, was reversed on November 7, 2007, and took effect in the issue dated November 17.