The Billboard Wayback Machine

When I was in grade school, the top 40 was a huge part of our family fabric. We were in our car a lot back then, and the AM radio was always on. I started buying singles when I was nine years old, and I’m still proud of the fact that my first purchase was “Right Place Wrong Time” by Dr. John. I’m not so quick to share my first album purchase with friends, however. “Right Place Wrong Time” was on the charts the summer of 1973. That was the summer my family moved from Ohio to Illinois. So many memories and feelings were tied up in those few months of starting over - new house, school, neighborhood, friends. Everything was different, except for the songs. The songs were the same. When we made it to Illinois, the new AM radio station – KXOK in St. Louis- was playing all the same songs as the station we left behind in Ohio.One of the first things my two brothers and I did when we arrived at our new home was get our Dad to take us to the Base Exchange (we lived on Scott Air Force Base) and buy the 45’s of our favorite songs. I got Dr. John and my brother Jeff picked up “The Cisco Kid” by War. I think my little brother Brian grabbed "Hocus Pocus" by Focus. We added to our collection over the summer and played those records to death. We'd listen to them all day and go to sleep to them at night, stacking them up ten high on our record player to create our thirty minute evening playlist. When one song finished, the arm would swing back and trigger the next 45 to drop ~Kathunk ~ and the next song would start. The songs from that summer are still magic to me.

A few years ago (years before the appearance of this game) I developed a trivia board game called “HearShot”. It was an audio trivia game, where a sound byte from a popular movie, song, or TV show was played and the players had to answer a "who, what or when" question which mapped to artist, title, or year. For example, the "who, what, when" for this movie quote: “This was No boating accident!” would be: Richard Dreyfuss, “Jaws”, and 1975 respectively. A common complaint first-time players would make before attempting the game was how impossible it was to have to guess the year something came out. Most people were surprised to discover that they were actually quite good at it. If you have a point of reference in your personal history, it’s not hard to conjure when something was popular. And songs especially can trigger memories. The quick hit one can get from a song can be so powerful that it can transport you back in time - like an aural version of Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine. To this day, when I hear “Alone Again (Naturally)”, I smell chlorine. The song was huge during the Summer of ’72, and I spent every day of that summer at Rona Hills public pool where they played the radio over the pool loudspeakers.

Hearing a song is a common memory trigger for people, but what about seeing songs? Just reading the titles and the artist names? Would that provide the same impact? And if you could group titles and artists together by a range of dates that had some personal significance, how powerful might that be? Billboard has a tool that allows you to browse the Top Ten songs from any given chart week, but I want to see more than one week, deeper than the Top Ten, and more than ten songs at a time.

This visualization contains the 10,000+ songs that were in the Billboard Top 40 between January 1964 (when the Beatles "I Want to Hold Your Hand" entered the chart) and March 2011. The view is pre-filtered to display the 98 songs that charted in the summer of 1973. Among them were "The Cisco Kid", "Right Place, Wrong Time" and "Hocus Pocus". It was a jolt to see those songs and others that I had forgotten about, but remembered instantly upon seeing the titles. Just seeing them brought the melodies and lyrics back, and for a brief moment I could remember what it felt like to be nine years old.

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The viz allows the user to select a specific range of dates using the sliders or entering manually, and see the songs from that period ordered by popularity in the period selected. The numbered ranking is based on performance in the selected date range: chart positions and weeks on the chart. Every song that made it into the Billboard Top 40 in that time period will be displayed. The color coding which indicates a track's peak position overall.

Clicking on one of the songs on the list will display a bar chart for the artist, showing all of their Top 40 hits in chronlogical order, color coded by song peak. Each song makes up a segment of the artist bar - the length of segment denotes weeks in the top 40. So the length of the bar is the total weeks the Artist was in the Top 40.

There is also a line chart which displays each individual song's progression on the chart from entry point, to peak, to exit: one point for each week in the Top 40. Ctrl-click on the chart list and you can see multiple songs at once. Highlight an artist and you can see all of their songs, color coded by peak chart range, and the spread of their chart paths over time.

The viz can also be filtered by artist or track, allowing the user to select a single artist or song or several at once and compare their chart histories.

The Source of the Billboard Chart Data

The data for the visualization came from the Whitburn Project dataset which I discovered through Infochimps. The dataset was not made available by Infochimps specifically, but the dataset description referenced Andy Baio’s blog Waxy.org where he describes the dataset in detail, and does some analysis on the tracks. The dataset is a labor of love of a group of pop-music enthusiasts who have come together to catalog and preserve America’s pop music history.

From Baio:

Named after Joel Whitburn and his authoritative Billboard books, the Whitburn Project began in 1998, when a group of 15 collectors pooled their resources to create an MP3 collection of every single in the top 40. The Excel spreadsheets were created to help them verify their collections were complete, with new versions updated and re-uploaded to the newsgroups weekly.”“For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they've created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song's duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart

There is some question as to the legality of sharing this data, but I'm hopeful that my re-appropriation of the data here falls under the terms of fair use.