Chart stats 2020
From
Mark Goodge@21:1/5 to
All on Tue Dec 29 20:57:02 2020
I've been playing around with extracting statistics from the chart data
as published by the Official Charts Company. Here are a few of the more interesting.
In 2020...
* There have been 729 different songs in the chart, by 547 different
artists. That's possibly a little lower than you might expect.
* Of those songs, only one has been in every chart of the year (52
weekly charts). That's "Blinding Lights", by The Weeknd.
* "Blinding Lights" is also the longest serving of 19 Number Ones this
year, having held the top spot for eight weeks.
* There have been nine different one-week Number Ones, although that
included the current Number One.
* Songs that first charted this year spent an average of 6.5 weeks in
the charts.
* At the other end of the scale, 178 songs have spent just a single
week in the chart this year. Although that also includes the current
Number One and a handful of other seasonal entries, of course.
* Excluding the current chart, the most meteoric rise and fall was
"Motive", by Ariana Grande, which was a new entry at Number 16 on
the 6th November and then disappeared from the chart the following
week, never to be seen again. (Unsurprisingly, most of the
one-week visitors were in and out in the lower half, the majority
being below 40).
* Two songs in this year's charts have only a single-character title.
That's "W" by Koffee and "X" by the Jonas Brothers.
* The longest title in this year's charts, on the other hand, is the
perennial "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" by Andy
Williams, which is 40 characters long (and not a bracket in sight,
which usually goes a long way to a long-titled song).
* Excluding re-entries, the longest all-new 2020 title is "The
Adventures Of Moon Man & Slim Shady", by Kid Cudi and Eminem,
which comes in at 39 characters. If they'd used "and" instead
of the ampersand it would have beaten Andy Williams.
* Five songs in this year's charts have titles so offensive that the
OCC replaces part of them with asterisks. That's more than in any
previous year.
Disclaimer: some of these numbers may not be precisely accurate as there
are several songs which had their published details changed during their
chart run (eg, "The Woo" by Pop Smoke was re-credited to Pop Smoke, 50
Cent and Roddy Rich after it first charted, and "Savage" by Megan Thee
Stallion has two different catalogue numbers), and this makes it harder
to do comparisons. I think I've caught all the ones that do affect my calculations but I can't be certain.
Mark
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