Did Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World Charts Tell the Same Story? Perception and Reality, 1960-1979

Abstract

ABSTRACT Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World had different reputations regarding the way they ranked records in their weekly charts; however, no systematic statistical analysis has been done to test those perceptions. This paper reports such a statistical analysis of chart behavior of 4,578 record sides, each with a unique and complete chart lifecycle, peaking at position 1–40 in all three magazines. Comparison was done at three levels: magazine, record, and year/decade. The magazines were found to have statistically significant differences of fractions of a week in some components of record lifecycle (rise, peak, fall, and length of time on the charts); however, those differences are not large enough to be perceived in chart behavior, where data granularity is one week. There are significant and perceptible differences, however, between the 1960s and 1970s, due largely to the differences in the number of chart entries. At record level, Billboard tended to score the highest-ranked records slightly higher than the other two magazines. Approximately 1.5% of the records show one magazine scoring the record significantly differently than the other two. Only fractional-week differences were found among the magazines in Entry, Peak, and Exit dates. Thus, on a macro basis, the magazines tended to tell the same story; on a micro basis they could tell very different stories for reasons that are not obvious.