The World's Music Charts

Previous Comments (newest first)

3 Jun 2013

selling info

is it possible for the site to list some major certification organizations'(RIAA IFPI) selling data for the artists (pardon the grammar)

Charts from the RIAA and IFPI are already included, see the source charts page

11 May 2013

Who wants to live forever

Who wants to live forever

27 Feb 2013

THE ULTIMATE RETROSPECT

I went thru just about everything in this site- every album of every year,every artist, single etc. and Id say the #1 conclusion Ive come to is that music started out bland but tasteful in the early part of the 20th century until rockNroll came along in the mid 50s; it kept getting better and peaked in the mid 60s, particularly 1966. After that it declined and has gotten worse and worse every decade. There were many great artists in the 40s, 50s, early/mid 60s, and the few in the 70s werent didn't have a place in the mainstream or commercial viability. +Im particularly pertaining to artists in these lists that were significant for whichever year, decade etc. And based off everything I've seen and been told its seems to me that the Beatles were the most over-rated, hyped up media affair. Im not undermining the good music they made but it boggles my mind how they were at the top of everything when they were in no way as great as they were perceived historically. The success of the beatles is a combination of the brilliant production of george martin, the consistent quality marketing of the media and the conformity of the masses. ALL these lists really go to show that the majority of the music that changed the world from the late 60s to the current is TERRIBLE. The music industry declined so much in the late 60s, continued to do so in the 70s and hasnt imroved one iota since. And this is coming from a young person under 30 who has spent their entire life absorbing every possible aspect of music history from the artists, to the songs, to the sales, to the significance and legacies. I apologize for being so blunt (or negative to the ignorant); please feel free to email me if need be.

9 Feb 2013

2012?

Hi,

When will the last year's charts be ready??

Steve (who does most of the work at this site) has been working abroad for the last two months, and also is in the process of completing a book (which should be out in the next two weeks)

Once the book is done we'll be able to get more of his time

14 Dec 2012

wheels was done by the xl's. I believe the group was out of st.louis in tqthe 60's. + Wheels was on the white whale label.

The group also had a minor hit with "After The Laughter Came The The Tears" by Patti and The XL's on Dot Records.

Thanks for the info. We have no hits that match either of them

26 Sep 2012

music in the 20th century

for an essay at the end of this term we have to answer this question 'what was the most remarkable decade in the 20th century?' we need to give reasons for our oppinion, music might be a good thing to write about, help

You might like to look at the FAQ question "Can the charts here tell us anything about long term trends", as well as some of the anlalysis on the "Sales over time" section of the "albums sales" page.

Also the CSV file (available from the "Versions" page) could provide some evidence to support whatever argument you might want to put forward. Personally I wouldn't like to have to single out any one decade as being "the most remarkable", I can think of good arguments to pick any of them.

23 Aug 2012

Wheels

I'm also looking for the artist who made Wheels. The lyrics from the post on July 8 are accurate as well as I can recall. Thanks in advance for any info.

8 Jul 2012

Wheels?

I am seeking some information about a song I think was titled "Wheels". The lyrics are (I think) "Wheels you're the ruin of me, you drove me to the end of the line. Wheels, I lost the girl that loved me, you took me for a ride the very last time". Help please.

8 Jul 2012

Wonderful research

I am a musician and a music teacher, and I only just discovered this site because I was annoyed about someone trying to tell me recently that the Beatles music was crap. My argument was that on the basis of musical analysis alone, that statement was foolish. +If you take into account their success and popularity, it is ridiculous - your data proves it.

I couldn't help wishing that Sinatra topped the list over Elvis for artists in the 1950s though...

:D

THANKS!!!

6 May 2012

charts

hi, i noticed that it had been a long time since there had been any variations. hope that the site is still active.

Thanks again

We're still here

15 Apr 2012

to make this wonderful site even more useful...

Hi -- Yours it without a doubt the most useful single resource for music I have ever seen, outside of Youtube, but I very nearly did not find it. I'd been looking for some time for a website that pooled and synthesised chart information, and despite diligent searching only wound up stumbling on your project through the links from another site. What I was looking for was a way to acquaint myself with the chronological chart history of recorded music globally, but wanted it all in one place so I wouldn't have to resort to 100 different charts, if the information could even be had. What you've done here is just amazing.

At any rate, what I wanted to suggest was that you could make this incredible resource even more valuable -- and avoid all the pestering from people wondering where their favourite missing hit fits into all of this -- by providing a catchment supplemental page for each year that holds the remainder of the songs that didn't make your Top 100: it wouldn't even be necessary to rank them for this to be immeasurably valuable.

My main interest is in cultural variations, juxtaposed against the big picture. As such, I'm probably in the minority here, but I'd also love to see a sort option that would allow you to select a country or region and see a list of songs that only charted in their part of the world in a given year.

Anyway, annoying suggestions aside, just an incredible website. You've done something culturally important here.

Thanks for the kind words.

Obviously we list the top 100 each year because they tend to be the songs that users are most interested in. However there are many other advantages in adopting the structure we do.

For example by not listing all the entries in, for example, the Billboard charts we ensure that our quoting of their data is what is called in US law an "original work of authorship". We quote less than 50% of their entries, so anyone interested in discovering all the US chart entries has to do so on their site. We obviously only cater for those that want to combine information from many different county's charts.

In addition by focusing on the top entries we end up with only the higher quality data.

When we check the entries obtained from the external sources we find that they are on average about 97% accurate (that is not obviously with inconsistent names). When we merge in another chart there are processes that check the new entries against the existing data, these can spot many of these types of mismatches, provided the new songs already exist in another chart.

The majority of song entries (about 68.1% of them) only exist in a single chart, in other words for two thirds of the chart entries there is no confirmation of spelling or song name.

On average we have more than 1,200 song entries for each year, by showing only the top 100 songs we are selecting the 8% that have the most validated entries (because their names are confirmed in so many other charts). If we were to list all the entries then two thirds of the entries would be uncheckable.

So for both those reasons we would need a lot more convincing before we extended the pages.

You also suggested that we could analyse charts by region. We looked at this when we added the "Europe v North America" pages. There is obviously a trade-off between smoothing charts out so you get an accurate impression across the whole world and focusing on individual territories and getting a chaotic picture that is dominated by the "lumpy" nature of individual charts.

We did a bit of statistical modelling trying various combinations and came to the conclusion that we could track success for a given year in Europe and North America, so that's why we created those pages. We also track success in the 9 regions (shown in the profile pictures) provided we combine entries across the whole range of years.

Both these cases have their limits, the Europe v North America pages only show the top 20 songs, the profile pictures have obvious issues for success before 1950. Our experience has been that these "focused analysis" exercises tend to obscure actual trends behind a flurry of accidental results (that's why we ended up doing statistical modelling, to prove that this was inherent in the data rather than a consequence of the particular processing we were doing).

Of course we also resisted listing number ones by date for a long time because of exactly the same types of concern about accuracy, and glossing over the reasons why no-one really knows what was actually number one on the 6 Feb 1952. However that now seems to be one of the most popular areas on the whole site, most users it seems would rather have certainty than accuracy.

Have you downloaded the CSV file from the versions page? Using that data you could do a crude version of what you are suggesting.

3 Mar 2012

Fantastic site!

Wow - what an achievement! This is my first time on this site and I don't know where to start. My particular interest are the Billboard US charts and although I have bought various books on US charts - Joel Whitburn in particular, I have never seen this data electronically.

My particular question is can I download the Billboard data spreadsheet from this site or do I need to request it from Bullfrog?

Keep up the good work. It's an awesome task which is never ending.

All the best DJ Dan

The Bullfrog data is available from their site (on the "Download" section). So the answer to you question is no, we won't supply their data, but you also don't need to "request" it from them, it is easy to download.

16 Feb 2012

New Songs, Etc.

This is an amazing site; thank you for your work! It kind of goes hand in hand with acclaimedmusic.net, this being the one to see what was popular at the time, etc..

Would you label yourself as the most concise chart site/archive on the net? Also wondering if you continue to add charts for the more recent years as you go along/they be come available (and around when do you think viewers could expect an accurate representation of the last few years, etc.).

Thank you Giovanni

As far as we know we are the most comprehensive chart site on the web (since we have 183 source charts containing 389,210 entries as of version 2.1.004). We don't think "concise" is quite the right word, the site has more than 5,000 pages some of which list 1,000 items, in fact we've had some users complain that there is too much information here.

You are right in suggesting that the most recent years are not yet accurate. The way we gather data is more focused on getting history right rather than reporting current events. Our experience has been that 3-5 years has to go past before our pages reflect a reasonable view, so we'd trust our listing for 2007 at the moment, be prepared to defend the 2009 listing but have no faith in the 2010 one.

18 Jan 2012

Youtube Videos of Tsort

Hello. I'm not sure if I already sent a message over here, but I never got a reply, so I'll try again.

I have used the music information available in this website and made Top 20 Countdown youtube videos showing 30 second clips of those videos. So far i've done videos from every year since 1980 until 2009. You can see a playlist with all the videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL03D41B7DB0109D19

Additionally, I made a longer video showing the 1st track of every year that you showcase, in this case, from 1900 until 2009:

http://youtu.be/9ICgfX1xuWY

I can't wait for you to upload more charts so I can get started for the years of 2010 and 2011. Also, when I get more time I expect to cover at least until 1950 (So I still need to do the 70s, 60s and 50s, quite some work!)

I was wondering if you've had the time to see any of these videos, and what is your opinion about them. So far, the total number of views for all tsort-related videos is of 20348 views, but I expect to double that amount in the next 6 months.

Cheers, and keep up the good work!

Hayen MIll

28 Dec 2011

v2

There are a lot of major changes in the latest version of ths list. Some songs/artists have disappeared completely. Some obvious problems also. For example Boby Fuller four I Fought the Law disappeared while the lesser known Tennessee Waltz is still there (had a lower score in previous versions)

The Bobby Fuller Four song "I Fought the Law" was a hit in 1966, while they released the "Tennessee Waltz" in 1959. The Bobby Fuller Four version of the second song still has a much lower score than the first, however it is listed in the CSV file because it is in the top 1000 song titles. We don't see that as a "problem", it is exactly the anticipated behaviour and what someone investigating the song "Tennessee Waltz" would want.

There were a lot of changes, that was the whole point of the new algorithm. It addressed what we felt were some significant distortions, such as the emphasis on European charts from the 1980s & 1990s. We knew the results would be different, that was why the data version number went to 2.0 (from 1.10).

The results do still have some issues, and if anyone can suggest ways to make the results more consistent we would be very happy to hear them, but we feel that the 2.0 data is a significant improvement on the older set.

28 Dec 2011

"My House" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

I really like what you've done here. Great jog. However, I can't seem to find this song on your site, or in the csv data file I got from you. Am I missing something? This songs was a chart hit.

We think the song you are after is "Our House" (not "My House"): Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - "Our House" - 1970: Holland 10 - Sep 1970 (6 weeks), France 10 - Nov 1970 (1 week), Canada 19 - Oct 1970 (5 weeks), Record World 20 - 1970, US Billboard 30 - Sep 1970 (9 weeks), Australia Goset 44 - Dec 1970 (3 weeks), POP 50 of 1970, RYM 135 of 1970, WXPN 774

However neither Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (as the artist), nor "Our House" (as the title) reached high enough to have their own page.

28 Dec 2011

"Our House" from Crosby, Still, Nash and Young

I really like your charts. I use them all the time. I found a song you're missing. "Our House" reached #30 on the Billboard charts. Yet, it's no where to be found in your charts.

The group "Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young" were album artist number 248 (in data version 2.0.012), so they have a page listing their albums. However since they were song artist number 1,365 and we only have pages for the top 1,000 artists, there is no page for them.

The song title "Our House" also didn't make the top 1,000 titles.

28 Nov 2011

Thank you

My wife and I entertain at nursing homes. Having some artist/song information makes the program more interesting. This site as well as secondhandsongs.com are so helpful. Thank you and happy holidays - Tom Bruno

12 Nov 2011

reshuffle

i really like this site. may i ask how come recently a reshuffle in the top lists occured

The way we calculate the scores was changed quite radically last month. That is why the data version number went from 1.10 to 2.0

The reason for the change was that some users pointed out some anomolies in the way songs from the 1990s were ordered. Particularly music that that had success in the USA but didn't do well in Europe. We modified the scoring system to overcome some issues with having too many charts from smaller countries.

The first attempt introduced some other unwanted features so the algorithm has been further tuned. We hope that the overall result is a better.

If you see any results that look "odd" tell us about them.

25 Oct 2011

chart data

Pitchfork - www.pitchforkmedia.com & Digital Dream Door - www.digitaldreamdoor.com for album and song lists & Fast n' Bulbous - www.fastnbulbous.com for album lists

Thanks for the suggestions. We already have some charts from digitaldreamdoor and we'll look at the others.

PS - We've looked at www.pitchforkmedia.com, it has a number of lists, like "Top 200 Songs of the 1960s", but they all seem to be selected by a group of critics, and selected recently.

The site www.fastnbulbous.com seems to be a personal rating site.

Both these sites seem to be subjective and both look too focused on particular acts to be usable.

Thanks for the suggestions but we don't feel that those two sites are objective enough to be usable as sources

24 Oct 2011

Chart data suggestions+

Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Polls - 1971, 1974-2007 at www.robertchristgau.com

The Details - best albums from 1957, 1963 to present at www.thedetails.co.uk

We'll have a look at them, thanks for the suggestion

PS: We've examined both these sites and decided not to add them.

The "Village Voice" critics seem to be typical of attempts to identify "the best" music, rather than "successful" music. Now we have no issue with that approach but this site attempts to focus on music that was, and continues to be successful, rather than telling users which music they "should" be listening to.

We have added this chart as a contributor to the details, so users can see what this critic's view of each album was, however we've ensured that this does not affect the overall score.

The other site you mention has to be rejected for two reasons, firstly because it is a single critics list (the 1965 list, for example, has two Dylan albums in the top two slots). But more importantly we already have far too much chart data from the UK, for some reason the people of Britain are more prolific than any others in sharing their musical knowledge (of course we are UK based, so part of the same phenomenon). The volume of evidence we have for the UK for this period is already more than sufficient, until we have more data from Asia, Africa, Central & South America, and even from the USA, we don't want to add any more from the UK.

26 Sep 2011

Celine Dion

Don't you think that Mrs Celine Dion is a bit OVERrated in your site?? Cause from where i see she is above Michael Jackson, Phil Collins and Queen even in some Entries...

In the best list, that is the "All Time Music Act" list we have: Celine Dion 49th, Michael Jackson 19th, Phil Collins 44th, Queen 17th. In the Song Artists lists we have Celine Dion 47th, Michael Jackson 5th, Phil Collins 28th, Queen 13th. In the Album Artists lists we have Celine Dion 14th, Michael Jackson 10th, Phil Collins 29th, Queen 12th.

So in the main lists she's below all the acts you mention except that she is noted as having more overall album success than Phil Collins.

The only main listing where she's above those acts is in the "Success in the 1990s" chart. Which, given the number and success of her albums and songs in that period, looks like a valid measure to us.

On the "Number 1s" page her song "My Heart Will Go On" is listed as being number 1 in more charts than any other song. But that just reflects the fact that we have more charts for 1998 than we do for say 1982 or 1976.

So no, we don't think that her position is inflated.

26 Sep 2011

Chart data

Here are some suggestions for new chart data: 1.KEXP's Top 903 Albums - www.kexp.org/top2008 2.WFUV 90 Essential Songs - www.wfuv.org under Music: Bests and Essentials Lists 3.WFUV 90 Essential Albums - www.wfuv.org under Music: Bests and Essentials Lists

We feel that all three of those charts are somewhat questionable, being all time charts based on "listner votes". However our instinct is to include charts unless there is a good reason for not doing so.

We've added the charts, but made it so they don't contribute to the overall score (the positions are noted on the entries of course).

Thanks for the suggestion

25 Sep 2011

Billboard info for songs listed from 1901 - 1929

Hi, again, this is my fifth time sending message to this site...What a spectacular site. Love it!! First, the comprehensive info, then, the nitty-gritty details on every songs. Thirdly (and most importantly) the forever responsive reply. Irregardless its a meaningful questions, corrections or downright simple questions.

Some sites don't reply at all..its annoying.

Anyway, my questions is during the period from 1901 to 1929, has billboard exist yet? Do they have charts and radios doing the counting of the song rotation? I thought billboard only start in the late 50's, wasn't it? I'm a music aficionado, songs and info from the 30's is hard to find, and yet you have the effort to go beyond the 20's.. May i know where in other sites i can search for 20's music info (other than wiki)?

Arnaz

We're glad to see that you enjoy the site. Your comments encourage us to keep putting in the effort.

To answer your question:

Billboard magazine started publishing in 1894. They published their first music "hit parade" in 1936 and their first "Hot 100" in 1958. We understand that from 1936 to 1958 the charts were irregular and didn't have a consistent form. In addition the focus was on "sheet music" sales so while the chart will say, for example, that the song "Sentimental Journey" was a hit in 1945 it won't tell you if the version by the Merry Macs, Hal McIntyre or Les Brown & Doris Day was the most popular.

A US music historian called Joel Whitburn has used the information from the irregular charts, the Billboard magazine contents and other sources to retrospectively calculate the charts from 1890 to 1958. This is published as a spreadsheet by a guy calling himself "Bullfrog" (the source is listed in the chart entry).

That is the listing we base our information on.

11 Aug 2011

Many, many thanks!

I just time travelled! I made an MP3 album of one song only from each year of the 20th century, from 1901's "In the Shade of the Palm" by Harry MacDonough to 2000's "Californication" by Red Hot Chili Peppers, 100 songs total, and I couldn't have done this without this website's help!

The goal of this playlist wasn't to capture THE number one hits of every year as some songs were pretty far down on the list, but they had to be songs I personally liked (and I loved every ONE of them), and they had to define the time period they were in, of course. The goal of this project was to experience the evolution of music through the twentieth century, from the ragtime days, to the flapper days, to the blues days, the big band days, rock n' roll, ballads, classic rock, disco, new wave, rap, alternative, and heavy metal. I have had the last two days of work off and feel like I just got back from a long time traveling trip doing this! I have fallen in love with genres of songs I have never liked before.

So what is my favorite song from the 20th century? I'd have to say "Blue Skies" by George Olsen & His Orchestra (1927), and that's coming from someone born in 1984!

Your website and list of songs have helped me immensely. Again, many thanks!

Fantastic, that's exactly the type of project this site was designed to support. We especially like the idea that you selected your "best" song from every year, rather than just going for the highest scoring one. That forces you to sample a few and reject some of the inevitable dross that was highly placed.

It would be interesting to see your playlist

21 May 2011

Year of this song by The Merry Macs

Help me, please, I want to know when "I get the blues when it rains" was realased by The Merry Macs.

Thank you for your atention.

That song was not a hit, so we have no entry for it. Of course the "Merry Macs" did not do well enough to get into the top 1000 artists, so we don't have a seperate page for them.

However they had hits from 1939-1945, almost all listed in the Billboard chart from Bullfrog. We would suggest that you want to follow the link on our "Source Charts" page and download Bullfrog's excellent spreadsheet.

22 Apr 2011

This is without a doubt one of the most interesting sites I've ever found.

Any plans of, maybe, tagging artists or songs with info on genre, recording medium, etc, to allow for more insightful analysis? It would be interesting to compare the most successful songs within a specific genre or medium. Might the song and artist pages be linked with info on other sites, such as Wikipedia, Youtube, or specialized sites like redhotjazz.com?

That certainly sounds like an interesting idea. For our own music collections we use this data in combination with sources of lyrics and cover art to add extra value. We also use the charts to generate playlists (for example containing all our songs that were top 10 hits in Europe in the 1980s).

We would be interested in discussing ways to expand the data we hold, or for others to exploit the data we publish with anyone who wants to get in touch.

21 Feb 2011

List for 2010

Hello, very impressive work, I found many classic songs here, Thanks! When can we see single list for year 2010? Thank you.

Thanks for the encouragement.

There is always a delay between the end of a year and when we can start collecting the data for it. To be honest we wouldn't have complete faith in our own listings for any period less than 5 years old, the data is too recent for our data analysis approach.

However we'll be adding a 2010 listing in the next few months.

29 Dec 2010

Wikipedia

Hello, great site, currently used some of the chart info for wikipedia however some other contributors believe this site is not a valid source of chart positions. Any way I can prove this site is valid, what sources does this site use? Thanks.

All the charts used on the site are listed on the "Song Charts" page (or "Album Charts" page), most of them linked to original sources.

We have seen some places where people claim that the data quoted here is invalid. Usually such comments have come from sources that don't provide any better data and often claim that "my private data shows the tsort site is wrong" and then when asked refuse to share that data or say where it came from.

If anyone makes a constructive suggestion we will normally consider it. We can do little about the people on the internet that feel it is easier to criticise our site anonymously than to offer suggestions to us for how to improve it.

There are also fans of particular artists who believe it is valid to assert "your site says my artist had fewer hits than a rival, therefore it is wrong", there is little we can do (or wish to do) to break their self delusion.

We've not seen anyone on Wikipedia claim that our data is wrong and should not be used. If you know of a page where that is being claimed we'd like to know about it so we can contribute to the discussion. There are many Wikipedia pages that do use this data, anyone saying you shouldn't is, we suspect, in the minority.

Our position is that a link on each artist's Wikipedia discography page to the matching page here would be helpful to most Wikipedia users. Of course Wikipedia's "Conflict of Interests" rules mean that we wouldn't add such links ourselves.

Of course the suitability of this data for use on Wikipedia varies, for example the description of the "Global" chart explains why that data shouldn't be quoted there. The charts from Poland, France and Brazil should probably not be used, but the US, UK and Australian charts are definitely the best available.

20 Dec 2010

Thanks, but Woody Herman got shorted.

I just discovered your site and am sure I will benefit from it often in the future. However, I notice that for Woody Herman, you list only "Blues in the Night." Woody had a number of other chart hits, including especially "Woodchoppers Ball" and "Laura." "Laura" sold a million for sure and I think "Woodchoppers Ball" did also.

Regards, William L Rupp, Fallbrook, California

Woody Herman has his own page (you can get to it by clicking on his name, via the "Song Artists" list, the alphabetical list of artists or the site index). It lists more than 70 of his hits (including all three you mention).

We notice that we have have entries for both "At the Woodchopper's Ball" and "Woodchopper's ball" which we'll obviously fix in the future.

17 Nov 2010

Amazing

I've been an oldies collector for years, but I've never found such a comprehensive site like yours.

I'm an application developer myself, one of the oldest who are still active, so I can write C# and Xaml better than English. Therefore, I can't find the right superlatives that you deserve, sorry.

One last question: How do you, as all the other code gurus, find the time to do what you do? I've so many unfinished projects on my disk, several uncompleted sites on the Internet, and plans for the next 25 years.

Thank you for your kind words.

We also have a lot of unfinished projects and indeed this data collection is being improved all the time. The most important factor is project time, the main code behind the project was created in 2006-7, based on an original piece of software Steve created in 2002. The most recent extension was written last weekend. The site you see is the result of input from a group of people over the period of a number of years.

We are lucky that we can clearly seperate the code, which Steve does, from the data fixing, which is done by everybody.

13 Oct 2010

Where can I download the CSV-File

Wow, what an amazing Website. Congratulations. The best I've ever seen !

Just one question: where do I find the CSV-File you mention ?

There is a link to the CSV file on the "Versions" page. If you follow the link at the foot of every page (the words "version number") you will find the page.

11 Oct 2010

Your web site.

Just a note to thank you for all the hard work that has gone into constructing this site. I am a music collector in the UK who loves chart information.

Your efforts are truly appreciated

Kind regards - Gerald Thorburn

Thank you

6 Sep 2010

About the site

I have to congratulate to you all for this great work. Very impressed

8 Aug 2010

These entries look duplicates (v1.9.0047. Haven't checked if it was corrected in v67)

{List of more than 30 Corrections with artist name, title and year}

Wow, what an excelent list of potential corrections, a couple of the items had already been corrected. With one exception the remaining ones have now also been done.

The only one we didn't do was The Isley Brothers, you suggest that the 1964 song "Who's That Lady?" is the same as the 1973 song "That Lady". As you can see from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Lady,_Pt._1_%26_2 the story is a bit more complex. The underlying song is the same but the group deliberately gave it a different title when they re-recorded it in the 1970s. Its a tricky question but we have decided to keep the titles distinct.

The rest of your suggested changes are clearly correct. Finding these types of mismatches between charts is one of the most difficult tasks we have to perform, so your list is very welcome.

Thanks for the input

20 Jul 2010

What an impressive site. Thank you for a fascinating source of music history.

1 Jan 2010

who sang this song?

Hi I'm looking for this song I heard it around 1993 and it goes like this, you said you had to leave yeah cause things won't work out so what does that have to with me if i was to much then daddy you should have a child it life responiabity to me you desert us , why daddy did you leave me oh we cried every other day tell me why daddy did you leave me but daddy it over now we'll see brighter day

No idea, never heard of it

28 Oct 2009

search engines

When you are looking for a song, or an artist to listen to their songs, why not have a clip or the whole song.

We don't host any actual music here at all, obviously hosting complete songs would be illegal and we don't need that hassle. We don't host clips because we don't have the time to collect them, we don't have the bandwidth to deliver them and we don't think it would add much to the site.

If anyone would like to collect, manage and host a set of music clips we would be interested to discuss how we could collaborate.

4 Jul 2009

Server Error

I keep trying to send you a message but the web site complains about a "server error"

Yes, one of us made a mistake while blocking spam messages from Russia 10 days ago. It has now been fixed.

And yes it was me

Steve

2 Jun 2009

Andrews Sisters

Corrected? I still see them both (now #35 and #36).

What we meant was that the data was corrected in the source data set, it obviously takes some time to "publish" from the source to the web pages. The processing alone takes about 16 hours.

In addition for the last couple of days the result has failed some of our quality tests, so we have had to correct some elements and resubmit the job (which adds another day).

The data should now show the correct values.

2 Jun 2009

Andrews Sisters

Corrected? I still see them both (now #35 and #36).

What we meant was that the data was corrected in the source data set, it obviously takes some time to "publish" from the source to the web pages. The processing alone takes about 16 hours.

In addition for the last couple of days the result has failed some of our quality tests, so we have had to correct some elements and resubmit the job (which adds another day).

The data should now show the correct values.

26 May 2009

Thanks for clarifying that, although I'm not quite convinced when I look at the already existing Bing Crosby collaborations for example. Anyway it's okay for me with the newly added comments on the Ella Fitzgerald page.

I got another one: #34 ("Hold Tight, Hold Tight", 1939) and #35 ("Hold Tight, Hold Tight (Want Some Sea Food, Mama?)", 1938) on the Andrews Sisters' page and is the same song and the same record, released at the end of 1938 and charted in the beginning of 1939, see the record label on http://rateyourmusic.com/release/single/andrews_sisters/hold_tight__hold_tight__want_some_sea_food__mama_____billy_boy/ (which also shows that it was a collaboration of the Andrews Sisters with Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra).

Corrected, thanks again for the info

23 May 2009

Sugestion

Hi! Great great job! Thanks!!!

It would be very nice if you could do it with separate continents. It would be very interesting to see how the order of the songs would vary on different sides of the planet! Different Cultures = Different Music "taste".

Just an idea...

p.s. - pardon my english! :) (by the way, i'm from Portugal)

Interesting idea.

For that to work we would have to have more than one input chart in each region, with enough entries to "smooth out" the peculiarities of any one chart. The bad news is that we don't meet those criteria for most of the World, or for any data from before 1950.

However we have had a go at adding such pages, if you look at any of the year pages for 1950 to 2005 you should find a link that will show you the results.

Thanks for the idea

PS. Your English is much better than our Portuguese

19 May 2009

A-Tisket A-Tasket Again

Thanks for fixing the "A-Tisket A-Tasket" entry. I'd say however that the correct artist specification for this record would be "Chick Webb & Ella Fitzgerald" (with a link to Ella, the same way as you did with some other collaborations, e), not just Ella Fitzgerald.

Regards Cornelius

You make a valid point, there certainly is a good case for listing it under "Chick Webb & Ella Fitzgerald". However, many sources list the song under just "Ella Fitzgerald" (possibly because she co-wrote it), there is no separate page for Chick Webb on the site and the "Chick Webb Orchestra" was renamed in 1939 as "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra" (after Chick Webb died) so we decided to assign this song to "Ella Fitzgerald".

The goal of this site is to consolidate the range of input charts, this often means that we have to "standardise" names. For example some artists have different names in different countries (like "Yazoo" or "The Detroit Spinners"), some artists change names from one year to the next (like "Prince"), or for a particular song (for "(Meet) the Flintstones" "The B52s" became "The BC52s"). Mapping the actual names on the record labels or printed charts to a "most common form" makes it easier for users to find connections between charts, if they then use that information to track to the original chart data they will find the original information and can decide if our consolidations are valid for their purposes.

A note has been added to Ella Fitzgerald's page to explain the situation, this also means that anyone looking up Chick Webb in the index will be directed to the right place as well.

Thanks for the input

8 May 2009

A Tisket A Tasket

Thanks for this great site that I must have overlooked for a considerable time. There are some mistakes of course, e.g. Ella Fitzgerald's "A-Tisket A-Tasket" (#8 in the 1938 chart) is the same record as Chick Webb's (#26 in the year chart) because she was the band's singer at the time and Joel Whitburn is always listing the bandleader and the featured singer. Here you can see the label of the original 78 rpm record with both names on it: http://rateyourmusic.com/release/single/chick_webb__and_his_orchestra_/a_tisket_a_tasket___liza__all_the_cloudsll_roll_away_/

Best wishes from Germany Cornelius

Thanks for the correction, the data has been fixed. That type of issue is the most difficult one to spot.

16 Apr 2009

Other

Cool site

Thank You

16 Aug 2008

A couple missing

Hi. Great site. Just started looking at the csv file. I noticed "Oh Lonesome Me" by Don Gibson is missing. It reached 7 on the US BB charts, and may have charted on others. Also two songs by Adam Wade from 1961: "The Writing on the Wall" (US BB 5) and "Take Good Care of Her" (US BB 7).

Roger

According to my list Don Gibson's "Oh Lonesome Me" entered the Billboard chart in Mar 1958 peaked at number 8, and was there for 21 weeks.

Adam Wade had 11 hits from Nov 1960 ("Gloria's Theme") to Jan 1965 ("Crying in the Chapel").

But neither artist did well enough internationally to be in the world's top 1000 artists. This site only lists the most highly placed acts (all the hits of the top 1000 artists, the top 1000 song titles and the top 100 songs of each year)

If you look under the title "I Can't Stop Loving You" you will see that Don Gibson's version was number two in Norway in 1960. Adam Wade is listed as having the least successful version of a song titled "Crying in the Chapel".