Billboard Notes: 1999-01-30
Apr. 24th, 2025 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dwvanstoneMax Martin has produced (or co-produced) 27 Billboard Hot #1s -- a record for a producer! (He's still behind Paul McCartney as a songwriter.)
His first was Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time" which rises to #1 this week (Jan 30, 1999) in Billboard history.
But what grabbed my eye this month was that most of the songs in the Top 10 had been on the charts for exactly 9 weeks. That's a weird coincidence! So I looked nine weeks back to the chart on December 5, 1998 and ... oh my goodness, 61 of the songs were debuting that week.
Whaaa????
Usually somewhere between 2 and 12 songs debut each week. Something must be going on.
So I found this article on Billboard which exclaimed:
Billboard looks back at one of the most important rule changes in Hot 100 history, which occurred in December 1998, and the immediate impact it had on the chart at the time.
But it's behind a paywall!
I finally found a Wordpress blog written by a fan who explained what happened. The team at Billboard relaxed their rules for what songs could appear on the chart. Before that date, a song could be on the chart only if a consumer could buy the single. After that date, any song was eligible (such as if it played on the radio).
Record companies were denying consumers the ability to buy the popular singles to encourage them to buy the full album. (This was before Apple introduced 99 cent individual downloadable songs.)
The page lists several songs that were very popular on radio that never charted because of this rule (such as "Stairway to Heaven"). I found it fascinating!
Thankfully, there are about 5-6 new songs each week so far in 1999. That makes it so much faster for me to catch up on the new songs each week. (Compared to 1967 or 2025.)
His first was Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time" which rises to #1 this week (Jan 30, 1999) in Billboard history.
But what grabbed my eye this month was that most of the songs in the Top 10 had been on the charts for exactly 9 weeks. That's a weird coincidence! So I looked nine weeks back to the chart on December 5, 1998 and ... oh my goodness, 61 of the songs were debuting that week.
Whaaa????
Usually somewhere between 2 and 12 songs debut each week. Something must be going on.
So I found this article on Billboard which exclaimed:
Billboard looks back at one of the most important rule changes in Hot 100 history, which occurred in December 1998, and the immediate impact it had on the chart at the time.
But it's behind a paywall!
I finally found a Wordpress blog written by a fan who explained what happened. The team at Billboard relaxed their rules for what songs could appear on the chart. Before that date, a song could be on the chart only if a consumer could buy the single. After that date, any song was eligible (such as if it played on the radio).
Record companies were denying consumers the ability to buy the popular singles to encourage them to buy the full album. (This was before Apple introduced 99 cent individual downloadable songs.)
The page lists several songs that were very popular on radio that never charted because of this rule (such as "Stairway to Heaven"). I found it fascinating!
Thankfully, there are about 5-6 new songs each week so far in 1999. That makes it so much faster for me to catch up on the new songs each week. (Compared to 1967 or 2025.)
