The K/MEN Top 129 of 1964
KFXM did not have a printed survey for the Top Hits of 1964. At least I've never seen one. If anyone out there has one, I would appreciate if you shared it with me!
This is based on the surveys I have from 1964. Here are 180 hits from 1964. Even some of the songs in the bottom 80 you will recognize as big hits.
6 comments:
Simply an incredible year for popular music was 1964! Such widely expressed diversity of the artists who waxed their songs in so many different genres. Perhaps this was the closing of an era before pop and rock music diverged so far apart that stations eventually began specializing in broadcasting as either Top 40 or Middle-Of-The-Road (Easy Listening). Yet, '64 stands out for the mass popularity for all audiences of nearly every hit that charted that year.
That's great work there, DougMaster, coming up with KF's top hits of '64. Could you explain how you arrived at the final listings, computed the individual record entries on where they placed in the countdown? This information may be interesting to your readers on the way these station summary lists are made.
I probably did the top hits of the year 12-13 years ago. I gave each song a certain number of points for each time it was listed on the top 40. I don't have the amounts available,but it was 1 point for number 40, 2 for number 39 and so on. I believe I gave extra points for being #1 #2 #3 #4 and #5. I just don't remember how many. I have it written down somewhere, but don't know where right now. It was done on an old computer program (DOS)that was on an old computer, now in storage. The program doesn't work on newer computers, so all I have are the printouts.
Did you write that in basic, DougMaster? That's a superb accomplishment using your old computer to compile all the stats for producing these top 100 lists for the missing years.
I look forward to seeing more of those all - time countdowns posted here for everyone's enjoyment!
To me it seems there's a problem with all countdowns for songs that "carryover" from one year to the next. A song could be #50 one year and #30 the next. If the coutdowns went from July 1 to June 30 it might be #15 for the period. Did songs ever get any "carryover" credit by anyone (whether it's Billboard, Casey Kasem ATF, or local stations)? Am I trying to make rocket science out of something that was just pop culture?
As a longtime affecionado of The Billboard magazine, it always struck me unaccountably bizarre about their Charts Department sticking to a cut-off date around mid-November for their annual Hot 100 Singles of the Year countdown. And they never have given any "weight" to a previous year's entries which fell within the current year's charting period. They simply went by a similiar statistical computation as described by our web administrator (in a recent post) except no extra points were given to any charted record single except for additional points accumulated when a single peaked and stayed at any given rank number (like staying at #1, #2, #5, etc., for X-number of weeks).
BTW, American Top 40, during Casey Kasem's era, used the Hot 100 chart provided them by Billboard.
Don't know about the "rocket science" involved, however, I do recall (as a former Music Director) that many radio employees HATED (you could hear them groan about it) having to compile their own station's yearly Top 100 countdown, and thus, many of them relied on some rather non-descript methodologies (akin to voodoo in some instances) just to get their
annual lists compiled and out of the way for radio programming purposes -- so that they could, instead, get on with the Christmas/New New Year's festivities.
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