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In 2017, Billboard dropped consideration of physical sales of single tracks (which had been on the decline for years) in favour of a formula combining the number of times a song was played on the radio with the digital song sales and how many times it was streamed.

That last element is important as it has come to dominate how consumers listen to their music, so much so that it’s by far the heaviest weighted of the three components of the Hot 100 chart.

It was only a matter of time when Billboard made their latest policy changes to what would be included in the Hot 100 chart on a weekly basis before someone would come along who was powerful enough to completely lock out the top ten spots on the chart for the first time ever in the chart’s history.

That would be four years ago today when Taylor Swift put all 20 tracks of the “Midnights (3am edition)” album on the Hot 100 with these being the top ten tunes for that week due largely to a truly massive amount of digital downloads and streams that really tested the resilience of the servers of the digital music services:

It should come as no surprise that “Midnights” also topped the Billboard 200 album chart.

So in honour of that achievement, we’re going to do something a little different tonight and we’re just going to start going down the top ten tracks on that week’s Hot 100 chart in order as far as we can until the puck drops which will likely be “Midnight Rain” (16:37) or “Bejeweled” (19:51) based on the average duration from the time I start spinning the tunes!

UPDATE: We actually made it a few seconds into “Question…?”… 🙂

Post-Game

A bit of a sneak preview of tomorrow’s theme which is all about one of the most mad looking instruments ever that sounds *SO* sexy…I’ve got a big playlist I’m bringing to bear! 🙂