The Whitburn Project: Hacking Billboard Charts

Ever heard of Usenet? Usenet was, and is, basically an unimaginably vast network of crude message boards that predated the web as we know it. And it is there, and not on Wikipedia, where the world's most anal musical research project EVER was produced: The Whitburn Project.

One fruit of the Whitburn Project's labor exists today in the form of a 21.8 megabyte spreadsheet. Which is huge. And that's what it takes to record, organize, and catalog every single "popular" song since the 1890's.

The Whitburn project is named for Joel Whitburn, a legendary researcher of popular music and author of several kinda ugly books on the Billboard charts. But the collective wisdom of hundreds of obsessive records collectors diverged from Joel's work several years ago (resulting from some wonky dispute about his column data) and now the project has a mind of its own.

This multi-terabyte collection of high quality audio files is an immense service to the public good, regardless of their illegality. But even the work done on the spreadsheet alone is bearing strange fruit. For instance, some bright kids in Portland just used it to make an interactive database of the top music videos for every week from 1980-1988.

I can't really post anything from this project to this blog without breaking the law. But if you want to look into all of this for yourself, you'll find the group's work spread over these tribes:

alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.pop, alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.pop.d, alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.country, and alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.country.d, alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.lossless and alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.repost

Read more about the project on Waxy; get started with Usenet here (if you're using a mac).

Comments

[Krys O.]

We have quite a few Whitburn books in our household. They're used almost daily. Must check the Usenet files.

[knkwzrd]

Also, for those of you new to USENET, you can also check out alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.19*0s (insert decade of choice) and you will almost certainly find chronological-by-charting-date posts of every song to have cracked the top 100 for every week in said decade.

[Joshua K]

Nice my easynews account has these, alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.lossless seems the most populated. Never realized these groups even existed.

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