Mission Accomplished (Part 2)

Hello again everyone. As you may have read in my post yesterday, I decided to embark a quite ambitious project where I decided to create a points system for the top 40  pop charts. Today, I'll explain how I came up with this system. Now yesterday I mentioned that I thought that "Everything You Want" by Vertical Horizon, despite not finishing a week at number one on a weekly survey, finished as the top song for the year 2000. To me, that made little sense. I thought to myself, "how can this be possible?" It was like winning the (then-called) Winston Cup in NASCAR without winning a race. So I thought, "why not combine the two?"

So, I decided to embark on creating a points system for chart performance. No, it was nothing official, it was something coming from a chart geek that I wanted to keep to myself at the time. At first, I it was somewhat primitive, positions 31-40 would get 1 point, 2 points for 21-30, 5 points for 11-20, 10 for 10, 20 for 9, 30 for 8, and increasing by 10 points up to 100 for #1. I also assigned bonus points for chart longevity, and at the time a bonus for high debut and biggest mover. No, this wouldn't be permanent as time would go on, and I had to miss a few countdown shows on the radio because of work commitments. At times I would take my notebooks of said charts and brought them to work; I still have those notebooks by the way.

Eventually over time, I would lose interest in these charts, primarily because "American Top 40" had a new host, and their methodology for tabulating their charts changed dramatically; going away from R/R / Mediabase 24/7 to USA Today for some whatever reason. But the message board I mentioned on yesterday's entry existed, so I could still keep tabs.

Then a few years ago, I found a breakthrough, when old issues of "Radio and Records" was found on a radio archive site, this one to be exact, and from there I could finally go to town on completing this list.

Tomorrow, I'll explain what points system I eventually settled with, as well as a few differences in R/R charts and the ones I used to compile said list. Until tomorrow...

CT