Record world and billboard charts compared: Singles hits, 1970–1979∗

The British invasion of American popular music: What is it and who pays?

“…Chart success is taken here to indicate the artists' prominence in popular music. The use of Billboard-derived charts is supported by Hesbacher (1982) who in a sophisticated analysis found their charts more reliable than those of Record World. The annual singles' rankings are based on weekly chart rankings and longevity.…”

Power Laws and Market Shares: Cumulative Advantage and the Billboard Hot 100

“…two weeks at #3 versus one week at #1, and reviews a range of earlier contributions that have similar objectives, including Hesbacher, Anderson, Snyderman, and Koppel (1982). The basic concept of most of these procedures is to assign different 'weights' or 'scores' to the respective chart positions that are meant to better reflect the underlying 'field data', i.e.…”

“…Because mechanisms other than cumulative advantage can also do this, power law distributions show up in an even more diverse range of areas than Yule distributions, but some relevant examples with moderate-to-good support include city sizes, the occurrence of words in English text, and the sales of music recordings (Newman, 2005). Hesbacher et al (1982) propose an equation to 'satisfactorily measure each position's appropriate proportion of designated popularity', resulting in a shape said to be 'resembling the mirror image of a J-curve' (p. 101). The formula is incorrectly transcribed in the original article, a corrected version is provided by Carroll (2015, p. 595):…”

“…Note that the objective here is to approximate the Hot 100, which during the 1960-2010 period has always included airplay as well. The output from Hesbacher et al (1982) and Carroll's (2015) formulas are easily numerically converted to a market share framework (for each chart positions x i , the 'weight' is divided by the sum of 'weight' over all values of x), and Figure 2 shows how the resulting curves compare to our version. According to Carroll, the 'fat tail' of Hesbacher et al distribution is 'driven by the steepness of the radio rating system' (2015, p. 595), implying that the distribution of airplay among popular songs is even more skewed than that of sales.…”

“…record sales and airplay figures. Both Carroll (2015) and Hesbacher et al (1982) provide formulas that take a weekly chart position as input and return an appropriately weighted value.…”