There are a number of reasons why there can be debate about
which record should be considered to have been "Number One"
in a particular country on a certain date. These are discussed further down
this page. However there is clearly a sizable group that don't want
to know about these details and just want to know what record was top of the
charts on a given date (such as their birthday). This table shows which records
were number one for various countries over the month of December 2014.
Before the NME started publishing weekly song charts in late 1952 there were
listings of "sheet music" sales. This list of number one songs
originally didn't have a particular artist attached. The data at //www.britburn.co.uk/
has the complete sheetmusic charts starting in 1939.
Based on the retrospective calculations of the Kent Music report, some songs
during the 1940s were not assigned to an artist, in these cases
a suitable artist has been picked.
The RPM magazine was the definitive national chart in Canada from the 1960s until
2000. Archives Canada have published a list of scanned images of the charts, but
no one has yet converted this into a usable form. This list of the number one records was
originally based on one from Wikipedia but has used the original source to fix the most obvious
issues.
Before RPM magazine published regular charts the Toronto radio station CHUM 1050 AM
aired a weekly chart. These are the number ones of that chart from before the RPM chart
started in 1964.
After the RPM magazine finished publication there is some debate about which chart
should be considered definitive in Canada. This listing is based on the Billboard chart
as described in the Wikipedia pages.
This list claims to be mainly based on the RIANZ charts. For weeks where no chart
was produced it has been assumed that the previous week's number one record just
retained the top slot (and in most cases the same record was at number one the
following week, so that seems reasonable).
This list of number one songs combines various sources (some retrospective) to list
the number one songs of West Germany and Germany since the early 1950s.
This list of number one irish songs from Wikipedia comes from various sources. We've
filled out the gaps and attempted to interpret the various "Issue Date" and
"Week Ending" notes.
In the text this claims to be hits in Europe from Eurparade, but since that chart didn't
start till 1976 this is clearly wrong. However this small set of entries
is early enough to be worth reporting.