Necessity Is the Mother of Obsession

or

What's this about anyway?

I have an iTunes library of over 40,000 songs that doesn’t fit on even the largest iPod. So I make use of 3. The smallest is a 30G which I use solely for hits. By hits I mean songs that have made the Billboard pop charts. I’ve made a smart playlist in iTunes for every year back to 1936, the earliest year for which I have a hit, and it’s those playlists that are in the 30G iPod. At first I’d put in any song that made the Hot 100, or the pop charts that existed before the first Hot 100 in 1958.

The problem with that is, over the years, the changing nature of the industry and the different methodologies used in compiling the pop charts meant that the number of songs that made the chart during a given year could be anywhere from 200 in the 40’s to almost 700 in the 60’s and 70’s. So some years would be overly represented if I included everything. Not to mention that if a song peaked at #89 and was only on the chart for two weeks, was it a really a “hit?” I mean, the whole reason for a “hits only” iPod is to hear familiar songs and/or to get an idea of what popular music was like in a given year. So including obscurities would defeat the purpose. And after a while, as I acquired more music, they wouldn’t all fit on the small iPod anyway.

So I got out Joel Whitburn’s Pop Annual, which lists all songs that made the Billboard pop chart in a given year in order of their peak position, got a rough idea of what the top 200 hits of each year were, and removed everything else but those top 200 from my year by year playlists. That got it down to less than 30G for a while. Then I kept getting more music.

To be clear, I don’t own the top 200 songs of every year since 1936. I only have one song from ’36, but up to 175 from some years in the 70’s and 80’s. And when it came time to whittle down the playlists again, I thought it would make sense to start with the years for which I had the most songs. And this time, I wouldn’t guess about it. I’d do the chart research and compile what, for me, would be a definitive list of the top 150 songs of each year, using the weekly Hot 100 charts and an inverse point scale based on the scale Billboard used to use to compile their weekly charts. My list would also be influenced by Billboard’s official annual year-end chart. And then I could make a countdown playlist. Fun!

Every time I do one of these lists, it represents about 15-20 hours of research. When I’d tell my friends what I was doing, one would occasionally ask, “Are you posting these anywhere?”

It hadn’t occurred to me. I was just making space in my iPod. But now that I’ve thought about it, I know there are even bigger music and chart geeks than I who might like to see them. And casual music fans could find them interesting too. So here they are, one by one. I’ve done lists for ’82-’89 and 2000-’02 so far. It’ll take me a while to get them all posted and then to do others. I think I’m going to finish out the 80’s and then continue going back through the 70’s first. Unless I feel like visiting the ‘00’s occasionally or taking on the clusterf*** that was the Hot 100 for much of the 90’s. We’ll find out together.