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EARLY ACCESS: The Biggest Hit of Every Week in Billboard History 1958-2025
🕑 Added 2025-07-31 17:14:53 +0000 UTCTo answer everyone's first question: the Summer Top 20 ranking is in final editing, should be done in a few days.
Now that that's clear, I'm so thrilled to share this project with you all! I've been working on it for over a year now, and now I'm able to present the completion of the first phase: An interactive record of every single week in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, from it's inception in 1958 right up to the present day!
This video is tuned so that watching it for 1 second is approximately equal to living for 1 day in that time period, and through this, you'll be able to pick any date in history, and very quickly understand what the general sound of pop music was during that time. While I do think that this makes for a very entertaining video, I also think it's a very potent research tool for anyone interested in historiography of pop music, and I personally have been using it as such since I started working on it.
For the moment, the video is just the raw footage of the songs themselves with no commentary from me, which I do think makes it more purely useful as a resource and historical documentation. However, when all is said and done, I do intend to release a commentated version of the video, discussing the evolution of music as it happens.
I originally intended for the video to start where it does now, in 1958, but I've since found more music chart records going back to the 1890s, so I've decided to expand the list a bit more and make it a record of every week of popular music for the past century, with the final time frame likely being 1926-2026.
This means that, when this video is complete, you'll be able to watch, in real time, the full history of American popular music, seeing it evolve day by day from Louis Armstrong and the big band leaders of the Roaring 20s into the scene of Cardi B and Chappell Roan in the present day. I find that idea to be fascinating and thrilling, and I hope that you will as well!
Comments
Chris McGuire
Any way to get this as a Spotify playlist?
The Mercian People's Front
Great stuff Sean! Anyone who wants more context for the early parts, check out the History of Rock in 500 Songs podcast, it's great.
