I’m back with a new music viz. I could be stuck on this dataset for a few more vizzes. It’s well known that I’m a fan of all music. One of the many things I listen to is top 40. Actually, the Slacker Top 40, to be specific (more on that in a future viz in the works). So I was thinking about Top 40 and led me to Billboard’s Hot 100. It’s the one list that brings together all singles from all genres.

Luckily, Billboard keeps an archive of every chart list for every week the Hot 100 has been in existence. Even more, they keep in list format. Time for me to queue up my favorite web scraping service, import.io. A couple hours later, I had a nice clean dataset, ready to go.

As I was playing around and discovering the dataset, I had a question pop up.

How many songs have debuted at the top of the chart?

And with that question in your mind, may I present

Click here for the interactive version.

32! Think about that for a minute. Out of all 3,058 weeks going back to the second week of August 1958. There have only been 32 songs to debut on the chart at the top. And outside of the very first chart ever, we had to wait nearly 40 years to have it happen.

There are a couple really interesting facts that I gained from this exercise.

• Mariah Carey
  • Mariah has had 3 songs debut at no. 1
    • Fantasy
    • One Sweet Day (collaboration with Boyz II Men)
    • Honey
• American Idol
  • During the show’s peak in early 2000’s the contestants first single debuted at no. 1 FOUR years in a row!
    • Clay Aiken (show runner-up)
    • Fantasia (winner)
    • Carrie Underwood (winner)
    • Taylor Hicks (winner) (SOUL PATROL!)

This was a lot of fun. And it is a really cool dataset. I’m excited to see what else I come up with. Of course, I’ll keep you in the loop!

Until next time!