Over the past several months I’ve been engaged in a Vision Quest on this tiny slice of the Internet, attempting to locate and suitably disparage the worst Number One songs of the Rock Era. That quest will reach some sort of fruition next week with a rundown of the worst-bests of our current decade; however, the process of reviewing the top songs of the last two decades has compelled me to focus on the myriad changes that have rocked the music industry – and the pop singles charts – since my brief tenure as a copy editor and writer at Billboard in the early 1990s. In order to understand those changes more clearly, I decided to enlist the guru himself – Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s Director of Charts and Senior Analyst.

If you’re a chart obsessive like I am – and if you’re still reading this, you probably are – you likely are aware that, beginning around the time I worked at the magazine (really, I swear it’s not my fault), dramatic changes rocked the seemingly well-oiled machine known as Billboard’s Hot 100. The magazine began using computerized analyses of both airplay and sales at that time, in an effort to make the Hot 100 and its other charts more accurate than ever; paradoxically, though, changes in the practices of those who spun, manufactured and sold music conspired at that time to make the magazine’s flagship chart a less-accurate reflection of the public’s musical tastes.

By the end of the ’90s, the chart which had defined American popular music for four decades would be, arguably, a shadow of its former self – victimized by advancing technologies, fragmenting radio formats, declining sales and panicking record companies. These changes manifested themselves in ways that were clear to anyone who followed the charts closely. For one thing, singles began achieving longer stretches at Number One than had previously been the norm; whereas exactly one song (Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”) had spent as many as 10 weeks atop the Hot 100 between 1958 and 1991, no fewer than 15 have done so since then. Similarly, since 1995 a dozen singles have debuted at Number One; no single had done that in the first 40 years of the rock era.

On the other hand, since the ’90s it has been common for singles to advance all the way to the top of the Hot 100 without receiving airplay on hundreds of the stations that participate in the chart’s radio panel. And, in the development that was perhaps most disturbing to chart-watchers, during the ’90s many of the biggest radio hits – particularly songs by rock-oriented acts – failed to chart at all. (more…)