Artist:
Year:
Number of weeks:
Artist:
Song:
Peak Position:
One way of defining popularity in the music world is by making it to the Billboard Top 100. Started in 1936, Billboard has been one of the most trending standard record charts in the United States. As the statistics of singers and songs (such as sales, radio play, online streaming, and downloads) are collected for evaluation, it is possible to determine their weekly, monthly and annual rankings.
We are curious to see who have been the most popular singers in the past 40 years! With currently available data, we aggregated the number of times singers made it on the annual Billboard Top 100 from 1965 to 2015. Madonna made the most times on annual Billboard ranking followed by Elton John. We could say that Madonna has been (from 2065 to 2015) more popular than Elton John, who in turn has been more popular than Mariah Carey. That would be maybe an unfair definition of popularity, which would risk oversimplifying the concept. We need more detailed metrics to make a decisive conclusion about each performer's fame. An look at their Musical careers will let us obtain deeper insights into the subject matter ...
Following the career of top 5 singers from our overview, we take a deeper look at the top 5 singers musical career, measured by the number of weeks on Billboard Top 100 from 1965 to 2015. We see that popularity in music is much more complex than it looks on the surface. A performer's career fluctuates and evolves over time. An excellent example is Mariah Carey, who had a few relatively unsuccessful years starting in 1997 but returned very popular in 2005. Similarly, Madonna in 1988, whose single "Spotlight" didn't quite attract the audience attention. That said, despite the volatile nature of success, all these singers were able to stay on the Billboard for nearly an entire year at least once, which is a clear indicator of their relevance in the music scene of their years.
Click on Artist Key to Highlight
their carrer!
Making it on the annual Top 100 rank as well as staying on the board for a long
time appears to be a rather good measure of a singer’s popularity. However, we would
like to take on a more critical approach of exploring the singers’ ranking, specifically
their song’s peak position.
The shape of the distribution offers insight about the artists' performance across time.
Madonna has a dense distribution of entries in the top 10 range
while Elton John’s is more spread out among top 40. Although Mariah Carey does not seem
to have as many songs entries, she made the Top 1 or 2 thirteen times in total, even more than Madonna!
Songs peak position is a good measure popularity because it gives us information about how well-accepted
a singer or band was (the mere fact of being on Billboard does not entail success if the song's ranking was not high).
In three steps, we tried to present the complexity of fame in terms of quantity, duration, and distribution of the songs on Billboard.
Our goal is to provide the reader with an introduction to the many facets of popularity, and the difficulties of defining it.
Explore the musical career of your favorite artists. Write their name in the search box, and tap the "Add" button. You may click on an artist's key in the legend to highlight their career. The Artist Voyager is case sensitive and allows a max of five singers/bands.