Michaelangelo Matos

Michaelangelo Matos

And then older rock critics can call us nerds who spend too much time playing with calculators.

natepatrin

Michaelangelo Matos

Michaelangelo Matos

I am a longtime Fred Bronson fan (like you, Billboard Book of Number One Hits changed my life), but I gotta say, I avoid his Hottest... books in general on principle. There's too much to nitpick: he's come up with his own points system, and that's totally fair and fine, but there's nothing official or Billboard-sanctioned or (this is the important part) data-driven about it. The problem with lists compiled by him or by Record Research founder Joel Whitburn is, they're based entirely on chart position. Which is fine as far as it goes, but as we're all learning in this era of, for example, No. 1 albums that sell 60,000 copies, chart position tells you little about the relative strength of a record.

I mean, put it this way: one time, The Wall Street Journal did an article revealing the formula behind the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's incredibly complicated (way more involved than just taking 30 stock prices and totaling/averaging them), but it's an appropriate complexity, because it takes into account the myriad ways New York Stock Exchange rules have evolved since the 1920s and some of the wrinkles related to the particular stocks they've added and removed over the years.

A true version of what Fred's trying to do in Hottest... would be that complex: first, start with the actual point totals of sales and airplay that put a record on top in any given week; then incorporate various multipliers to give a fair shake to records that charted when rules were different (when B-sides were allowed/disallowed; when airplay-only songs were permitted); then throw in a formulation for how to weight pre-SoundScan/BDS records; etc., etc., etc. I know: impossible, right? Which is why I think it shouldn't be done.

I dunno, I don't mean to suck the fun out of such an enterprise, but when I see a list like the one Fred updates every five years that shows all these post-'92 records trumping the previous 40 years of hits, it just screams "bad methodology" to me.

Chris Molanphy

Michaelangelo Matos

As for the rest of the stuff in his list, I thought people stopped being that rage-filled and petulant about music (and stopped using more than two exclamation points in a row) when they left high school.

natepatrin

Al Shipley

Chris N.

Ned Raggett