When did the first music chart begin…and why?
What started as merely an industry concern for artists and label bigwigs became an essential feature of popular music’s landscape. For generations of UK kids and music fans glued to the TV screen every Thursday evening—Fridays from 1996—for that week’s Top of the Pops, the chance to see their beloved artists or next big act miming along to their latest number was eclipsed in importance by the all-important ritual of Tony Blackburn or Jayne Middlemiss, depending on your age, counting down the day’s top 20 toward the coveted number one slot.
Since the BBC’s pop cultural institution shut up shop in 2006, the single enjoying the top spot has become less prominent in the contemporary pop climate of TikTok charts and streaming ubiquity. Chart attention from the average music consumer has dropped in cultural command, but ever since rock and roll established the frenzy of the holy 45, singles have proved to be pop’s premier offering to the world, the 21st-century witnessing Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’ garnering over 40 million digital sales and The Weekend’s ‘Blinding Lights’ encouraging over five billion Spotify plays.
The single is not going anywhere anytime soon, it appears, and while the average pop fan’s paying little mind to who is or isn’t number one, the old heritage chart publishers are still feverishly collating sales and streaming data just as diligently as they’ve ever done. From Nigeria‘s TurnTable Top 100 Songs to the Félag hljómplötuframleiðenda that stands as Iceland’s chief chart body, every country’s music industry’s singles rankings are overwhelmingly informed by the example set by the UK and America.
The roots of the UK’s Official Charts began when New Musical Express‘—better known as NME today—advertising manager Percy Dickins needed an edge over his publication’s competitors.
Telephoning 20 record stores across the country every week and directly asking what had been sold, NME was able to launch their top 12 on November 14th, 1952, Al Martino’s weepy ballad ‘Here in My Heart’, the chart’s first number one announcement. Soon enough, rivals Record Mirror and Melody Maker would launch their own chart features across the next few years.
So, when did the first music chart begin?
First issued in Cincinnati in 1894, Billboard Advertising was launched as a means to cover the emerging advertising and bill-posting industry sweeping the nation in the dawn of mass commercialism. Expanding to offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Paris across the 1900s, the shortened Billboard would provide listings of must-see circus shows, general outdoor events, and an overview of entertainment news.
It was in June 1913 that Billboard published its first-ever chart. Documenting the sales of sheet music, Last Week’s Ten Best Sellers Among The Popular Songs was launched and first confirmed a number one with James V Monaco and Joseph McCarthy’s popular ‘You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)’, introduced by future The Jazz Singer star Al Jolson in the Broadway production The Honeymoon Express. 15 years later, Popular Numbers Featured by Famous Singers and Leaders would collate both radio and on-stage performances in their weekly countdown of the week’s successful songs.
Across the years to rock and roll’s full swing, Billboard rejigged or dropped three different chart rankings in 1958—Best Sellers in Stores, Most Played by Jockeys, and Most Played in Jukeboxes—and officially launched the Hot 100, the gold standard in American singles charting, which has endured to this day. Its first number one announced as Ricky Nelson’s ‘Poor Little Fool’, Billboard‘s Hot 100 and its formative predecessor charts would set a template the world would follow as popular music took over the world.
