Connecting the present to the past
Some of us just fall in love with popular music … for better, for worse … for richer, for poorer … in sickness and in health … ’til death do us part.
For me, that moment happened on June 9, 1985. I was listening to KZDX-FM in Burley, Idaho and taping my favorite songs as they were broadcast. (Ask a Gen-X-er about this practice!) Then I heard the opening fanfare of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, and I was hooked. The #1 song that week was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears.
A few weeks later I committed to begin listening every single week and writing down the positions of the songs. This meant that I could compare from week to week and get a broader picture of how my favorites were doing. Years later, I learned that many people have had the same idea; I always feel a kinship with the other folks who kept handwritten weekly logs of the Billboard top 40 in college-ruled notebooks. I brought my week-by-week lists to school and shared them with friends. Sometimes we even placed bets on which song would sit at #1 the next week.
No matter how broad a picture this gave me, I kept finding ways to learn more and more. Today I maintain a series of spreadsheets chronicling pop chart history, from the very beginning of recorded music down to the present moment.
In 2004, during a brief period of unemployment, I decided to create my first website. It was called “Number One in History,” and it was a straightforward lookup list of the #1 song on any date in history. To my shock, it went viral, first in 2008 and then early in 2012. In January 2012 alone, it received 30 million hits as people passed it around Facebook. It even attracted the attention of Billboard magazine; for a time, we partnered on it, and I made some money from the ads. Then the magazine decided not to renew our contract and instructed me to destroy the site, since it contained so much proprietary data. (All the same data is now available for free on Wikipedia, but hey, it was fun while it lasted.)
In 2017 I began a new project: collecting Billboard top 40 hits from every season of every year in Spotify playlists. Eventually that project developed into this website, which links to curated playlists of songs that really mattered, either because they were big hits at the time, or because they have built a legacy over time. By balancing these two factors, I think I capture a good snapshot of each moment in pop music history.
This site works better on a computer than on a mobile device, but I’ve tried to set it up to work adequately either way. It works best when you are a Spotify Premium subscriber and keep that app open on your device while you browse.
The main page of this site contains “flashbacks” — snippets from this precise moment in time. It begins with this week’s “Pop 50,” my own chart of current songs based on a balance of pop radio airplay, airplay on other radio formats, and online streaming. From there we go back in time in multiples of five years. However, you can go to any specific moment in time by using the menu to cruise directly to another decade. Scroll down until you find the season and the year you want to listen to today.
You may enjoy listen to these mixes, or you may not. Some of them contain so much variety that you may find them jarring; it depends on your tolerance for the whole scope of genres that can fairly be called “pop music.” At the very least, I hope these playlists might serve as a resource for your enjoyment and your learning. Click and drag from them into your own curated mixes!
Above all, enjoy and appreciate the whole history of recorded music, from Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s 1860 recording (on paper!) of somebody singing “Au Clair de la Lune” all the way through to whatever songs are popular when you are reading this.
One more note: this is not a money-making project. The ads on this site merely help offset the cost of WordPress for me. In the rest of my time, I am a spouse, a dad, and an Episcopal priest.
The Pop Music Anthology 