There are several Whitburn spreadsheets uploaded to multiple Usenet newsgroups sporadically, but the most useful is the “Billboard Pop ME (1890-2008),” which is posted in .pop. Over the last few months, I’ve tried multiple times to contact the maintainers of the spreadsheet and the excellent Whitburn newsgroup FAQ, but they haven’t responded. “Obviously with the addition of BPM, genre, and the like,” wrote Bullfrog, “it has become its own entity and will continue to be from now on.” They’ve also added new fields culled from their own research.
We feel that he went off the deep end a little, so will not be following his new numbering scheme.” “Whitburn has changed the way he numbers the annual songs at least twice since this was created. “This spreadsheet does not reflect the Whitburn information found in his books,” wrote Bullfrog, one of the spreadsheet’s maintainers.
Originally, most of the Whitburn Project was simple data entry and fact-checking, but as the project grew, it forked away from the Whitburn books. Later, other collectors found the spreadsheet and built tools on top of it, including a utility to rename files properly and locate missing songs. The Excel spreadsheets were created to help them verify their collections were complete, with new versions updated and re-uploaded to the newsgroups weekly. They experimented with trading the files on P2P networks, but eventually landed in Usenet instead. Named after Joel Whitburn and his authoritative Billboard books, the Whitburn Project began in 1998, when a group of 15 collectors pooled their resources to create an MP3 collection of every single in the top 40. Update: I published an entry about one-hit wonders and pop longevity. For the next three days, I’m going to publish some analysis and insights gleaned from their work. Despite its illegality, they’ve created a wonderful resource and you can do some fun things with the data. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.Īs far as I know, this is the first time the project and its data have ever been discussed outside of Usenet. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project - a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s.
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