Counting down to number one: the evolution of the meaning of popular music charts

Abstract

Every weekday evening on Columbia Broadcasting's (CBS) Late Show, host David Letterman delivers his tongue-in-cheek top ten lists. The lists have become one of the most recognisable symbols of American popular culture. Part of the humour lies in the pithy ranked statements about current events. However, much of the fun resides in Letterman's mockery of our obsession with rankings – rankings of everything from automobiles to college football teams to human attractiveness. The humour is sustained from night to night, week to week, year to year because of our uneasiness with rankings as a very powerful and enduring value-organising tool.

East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China

“…The information about consumers accumulated and acquired by retailers and radio networks in the 1990s prefigured the data collected through charts of digital downloads and streams in the first half of the 21st century (Prey, forthcoming). These are the latest in a history of ranked lists offering a visualization of the music market; a league table that orients the creative practices of musicians, business decisions made by industry executives and the listening choices of audiences (Anand and Peterson, 2000; Hakanen, 1998). Digital platforms and social media have amplified the importance of rankings and facilitated the proliferation of other charts (searches, trends, news, tweets) and expanded the idea of participation through opportunities for types of voting, comment and feedback.…”

Interrogating Datafication

“…Recent scholarship has focused on, for instance, cultural, as opposed to state, modes of counting through such topics as pop music charts (Huber 2010;Straw 2015), timing and imaging in sport (Finn 2016) credit bureaus and reporting (Lauer 2017), media and multi-culturalism (Hayward 2019), files, filing cabinets, and filing hands (Vismann 2008;Robertson 2021), feminist histories of quantification (Wernimont 2019), payment systems (Swartz 2020), and "methodolatry" (Mattern 2013). Earlier examples include texts on charts by Parker (1991) and Hakanen (1998), on memos by Yates (1993) and Guillory (2004), or infrastructures of classification such as covered by . In spite of this vibrant interest in quantitative cultures and institutions, there is surprisingly little research on how such techniques structure activity within cultural industries.…”

Making time stand still

“…2 There is, of course, some work focused on what I have suggested might be the 'general' idea of Top 40 (e.g. Barnes, 1988;Fong-Torres, 1999;Hakanen, 1998;Parker, 1991). Others have used analyses of the charts in order to map certain trends (e.g.…”