(March 24, 2025). Billboard Magazine inaugurated its Hot 100 singles chart in the issue dated August 4, 1958, just three years into the rock-and-roll era. It was a weekly tabulation of the best-selling and most-played records in America, and over time it was recognized as the nation’s premier pop chart. In the decades to come, it would outlast major competitors in trade publications like Cashbox and Record World, thanks in large part to the boost the Hot 100 received from being used as the source chart for the worldwide syndicated radio countdown show “American Top 40 with Casey Kasem,” beginning in 1970.
Week by week, the nation and the world became more enthralled as the Hot 100 chronicled the careers and hit songs of icons Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Barbra Streisand, Elton John, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, George Michael, Whitney Houston, U2, and countless more acts. Whether or not people agreed with the rankings, the industry (and most fans) cited it as the standard, and it remains so to this day.
But even the Hot 100 had its flaws. For its first 33-1/3 years, Billboard relied solely on lists created by radio station programmers and record store managers (and rack-jobbers) to compile its charts. In the technology-limited 1950s, 60s, 70s, and ‘80s, this meant that the charts department would rely on phoned-in or faxed lists of what those store and radio accounts reported as their top selling or most-played records. Those human-generated reports did not reflect the actual number of copies a product sold or how many times a tune was played, just what its relative ranking was compared to other songs on their lists, forcing Billboard to take all those inputs and use an inverted-points system to develop its composite ranking, without regard to actual sales or airplay margins between songs.
This meant that, in some cases, songs that were huge sellers in larger markets were balanced out by songs that were moderate sellers in smaller markets but ranked at the top of those markets’ lists. The disparity between what was actually selling (and being played) the most nationwide and what was topping the charts became even more evident as hip-hop’s popularity increased in the late 1980s but tunes by Tone Loc and others fell short of the top spot (Loc’s “Wild Thing” was the first double-platinum single since “We Are the World” four years earlier but famously stalled at No. 2 on the Hot 100 behind Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up”).
Still, even as criticism over the chart’s inaccuracies grew and pop radio became more splintered as the ‘90s settled in, the Hot 100 was the definitive pop chart, and for 33-1/3 years, under an aging methodology that relied on human input, it stood as the authority on what were the most popular and most consumed songs in America.
Then, in 1991, everything changed.
On the chart dated November 30th that year, 33-1/3 years after the chart’s inauguration, Billboard incorporated barcode-based, piece-count sales data – plus electronic detections of songs’ actual radio airplay – into its weekly calculations. The companies providing this new digital data – SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (now consolidated under Billboard’s data firm Luminate) – were no longer reliant on humans developing lists and faxing them to the trade publication.
From November 30, 1991, to the present day – or the chart’s second 33-1/3 years – every weekly Hot 100 has used actual sales or streaming data plus “airplay impressions” to determine the most popular (or, more accurately, most consumed) songs in America. If Billboard was considered the music industry’s bible, then its New Testament was now being written.
Now, with the next chart dated March 29, 2025, and going forward, the so-called “SoundScan” era will be the predominant one in Hot 100 history. The technology-driven charts powered by Luminate (formerly Nielsen SoundScan, formerly BDS) will forever outnumber the Old Testament way. As the years and decades pass, the pre-SoundScan era of August 1958 – November 1991 will move closer and closer to footnote status, which is a shame because those years contained some of the greatest charts populated by the greatest artists and songs in modern music history.
Yeah, the older charts might have been formulaic and, depending on one’s perspective, flawed in their calculations. But milestones were much harder to achieve, making them feel more special. It was why we marveled when the Beatles occupied the top five positions on a chart in April 1964 (which stood for nearly 60 years), or when one of their songs made its first chart appearance at a historically high No. 6 in 1970 (standing until 1995). It was why we celebrated the accomplishments of Debby Boone and Olivia Newton-John when their singles became the first in the Hot 100 era to reign for ten weeks (which stood until 1992).
We marveled at the Bee Gees’ historic chart dominance in the first half of 1978. We were in awe when Michael Jackson became the first artist to score seven top ten singles from Thriller or when his baby sister became the first to score seven top five hits from Rhythm Nation 1814. We chuckled in 1982 when Air Supply made a drop from the highest position inside the top 40 (No. 6) to a position outside of it the following week. We debated whether Whitney Houston’s seven consecutive No. 1 singles were indeed consecutive (given the release of an intervening single that was marketed only to R&B radio and thus never charted on the Hot 100), but we ultimately let history decide.
In Billboard’s Old Testament, we had more artist variety, more singles charting, no year-long chart runs and no four-and five-month-long stays at No. 1. In 1966, there were a then-record-high 742 singles that made the Hot 100 (without an album’s track list blitzing the chart). In the New Testament, we’ve seen extremes on both ends of that spectrum. At the end of 1999, the first full year that the Hot 100 was a “songs” chart versus a “singles” chart, meaning that songs no longer had to be available for purchase as a physical single (CD, vinyl or cassette) to be eligible, the total number of songs charting had dropped precipitously to 314. In 2024, with the advent of streaming and current chart rules that allow album blitzes by superstars like Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Beyonce, and others to simultaneously chart upwards of 20-plus songs from the same project, there were more than 400 Hot 100 entries… by May!
The Hot 100 has seen many tweaks and overhauls to its methodologies over the past 66-2/3 years. But none were as important as the incorporation of digital tracking technology in November 1991, which laid the groundwork for sweeping changes that occurred during the modern era. Since then, it’s gone from a singles chart to a songs list, and from a pop chart to an all-inclusive one that factors airplay from every genre imaginable. Plus, since 2013, it has included streaming from audio and now video sources (imagine if video play from MTV had been a chart input in the Old Testament years). Old recurrent rules have been relaxed in the new era as well, allowing songs older than last year’s spring cleaning throwaways to return to the charts after they’ve fallen off, as long as they meet a certain points threshold.
For decades, chart enthusiasts and music historians have compared chart accomplishments from the Hot 100’s second 33-1/3 years to those from its first. Many of those comparisons and the debates they’ve triggered have been ill-framed, often made without the proper context that considers the different rules that govern each era. With the chart dated March 22, 2025, the two histories have just achieved an equilibrium where the charts from both eras are the same in number – or about 1736 weekly charts apiece. Going forward, history’s scales will be tipped in favor of the Hot 100’s New Testament, with that volume now being the chart’s weightiest chapter.
As the scales tip and the new era officially outweighs the old, one thing remains unchanged: the Billboard Hot 100 still portends to chronicle the soundtrack of our lives. The only question is, in a world where numbers rule and algorithms dictate, will the charts of today be remembered as fondly as those of the past?
Perhaps that is a debate best left for the next 33-1/3 years.
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.
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