What Are The Biggest Hit Songs of All Time (and Who Are History’s True Multi-Hit Wonders)?
This time you get to find out the answers yourself by having a play with the interactive data app I made (using Shiny in R).
I’ve loaded up some music data — a lot of it — the 30,000 or so songs listed in Billboard Live magazine’s ‘Hot 100’ from 1958, the year the list began, till now, and used it to automatically trigger searches in YouTube for matching videos — it’s a simple bubble chart mashup, basically. But it will take you down memory lane, remind you how much musical tastes change over time, and let you twirl some dials to find the biggest songs and artists of all time (in the US anyway — a separate app definitely is warranted for Eurovision).
Just click the image link below to have a play (works best on a big screen). Try out the different search modes, and don’t forget to click on the data points to see the best YouTube video matches.
If you give it a play, you’ll notice a few things:
- Elton John is a big — the biggest — chart dominator with over 60 hits spanning three decades (the 70s, 80s, and 90s).
- The more recent the decade, the longer that hits tend to linger on the chart.
- Even if you claim to like more alternative music (like me), you’ll realize there was no escaping these songs. They were in the air and you couldn’t help but breathe them in. Love them or hate them, they’ve helped form the soundtrack to your life.
If you’re old enough, even this one has done that:
