Since 1940, the Billboard magazine has published a variety of weekly music popularity charts. Today, the magazine uses a combination of sales volume, airplay on radio, digital downloads, and online streams in order to determine the chart rankings. One of the most highly watched Billboard charts is the Hot 100, which provides a weekly ranking of the top 100 music singles. Each entry on the Hot 100 chart lists the current rank, last week’s rank, highest position, and the number of weeks the song has been on the chart. Other Billboard charts rank music by genre such as Pop, Rock, R&B, and Latin or rank the popularity of music albums and artists. 

Maya Alexander is a reporter for her university’s newspaper, The Campus Gazette. She wants to launch a new Film & Music column that will include commentary, summarized data, and statistics on music popularity. In an effort to convince her editor to give her this assignment, Maya researches and evaluates what The Campus Gazette might be able to use from the Billboard website (http://www.billboard.com)

Music is an integral part of campus life. A new Film & Music column in The Campus Gazette is likely to be very popular among the campus audience. The Billboard website publishes weekly data on music popularity charts ranging from the top 100 singles (Hot 100) to digital sales by music genre. We can summarize these numerical data for music genres that are most popular among college students and publish them in the new Film & Music column. The popularity charts on the Billboard website are coded in the HTML data format and can be easily imported into a table. For example, the Hot 100 chart shown in Figure 1.10 coded as an HTML table can be readily downloaded into a table in a text document.  

Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart

Our readers may also be interested in following the top music singles by genre. For example, Table 1.8 is an example of a summary table listing the top five singles in Country, Pop, and Rock, which is easily compiled from three different Billboard charts. This summary table can be complemented with written commentaries based on information provided by the popularity charts such as the highest chart position and the number of weeks on the chart for each song.

Top Five Hot Singles by Music Genre

According to the most recent sales and market performance, the Billboard website also organizes songs and albums into categories such as ‘Gains in Performance,’ ‘Biggest Gain in Streams,’ and ‘Biggest Gain in Digital Sales.’ These songs and albums have not yet reached the top 5 positions, but their rankings are quickly moving up on the popularity charts. The Campus Gazette can establish itself as a music trendsetter on campus by introducing our readers to these up-and-coming songs and albums in a new Film & Music column. Figure 1.11 shows an example of an up-and-coming single on the Hot 100 chart. Similar to the popularity charts, these music categories are formatted using the HTML standard on the Billboard website and can be readily imported into a text document. We can create commentaries on selected songs and albums from these lists to introduce up-and-coming music to our readers.

Up-and-coming music on Billboard charts

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