Which band had the most top tens in a single year in the 1970s?
In the age of streaming, where artists are counting up their royalties like a busker at the end of a shift, it’s easy to look back on the 1970s with rose-tinted glasses.
It was, without a doubt, the heyday of the music industry. Records were being sold as physical products, and gigs were being attended with rampant enthusiasm, so artists were being fairly remunerated for their work. Moreover, it was a decade that fostered a genuine appreciation for good music, so with all of those combined, it made the charts a genuine metric for success. Nowadays, an artist can have a chart-topping single or album, but find themselves back in their part-time jobs the next morning.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon was the biggest-selling album of the decade, with over 50 million copies shipped out to music fans, and at over $5 a pop for said record, a fortune was most certainly made. Crucially, the success of that album proves the second half of my point, whereby chart success was married with artistic integrity, and so toppling the top ten was an outright objective for all musicians.
But it was a competitive landscape. The 1970s will go down in history as perhaps the most diverse musical decade of them all, with rock giving way to its catalogue of subgenres, from psychedelic rock to punk rock and heavy metal. Meanwhile, soul was beginning to spread its wings under the toxic stewardship of Motown, and eventually that would give way to the glittering new worlds of disco.
Multiple styles of music were being offered to any music fan hungry enough to devour it, and so to come out on top of the rest took a song or album worthy of it. In the case of albums, we could all admit Dark Side Of The Moon was fitting, while the decade’s biggest track, Wings’ ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ is an entirely different discussion.
But what about the artists who consistently did well? Breaking the top 10 was an achievement in and of itself, so doing that multiple times in one year was reserved for artists who truly had their finger on the pulse of greatness.
So, what bands had the most top tens in a single year in the 1970s?
The spoils are shared on this record and aptly so. Both artists come from very different ends of the musical spectrum from that decade and go on to prove just how diverse the landscape of creativity was.
Both Jackson 5 and Jackson share the record for acts with the most top tens in a single year in the 1970s, achieving four each in 1970. With one band representing the burgeoning era of Motown, and the other the blues backbone that launched this exciting new era of rock, it was a year for all music fans to enjoy music of their own taste.
Of all their contributions, it was Elvis Presley’s ‘The Wonder Of You’ that enjoyed the top ten for the longest, staying there for a total of 11 weeks.
