For years Billboard's Hot 100 ignored some of radio's biggest hits
Goo Goo Dolls' Iris ruled radio airplay for 18 weeks in 1998, yet it could not appear on America's main singles chart. The reason was a rule held for four decades: a song had to be for sale as a single. Labels, hoping to protect album sales, simply stopped releasing them.
Billboard's charting began modestly in July 1913 with a list of the ten best-selling pieces of sheet music. Record sales rankings followed in 1936, and by the dawn of rock and roll the magazine ran three separate charts: store sales, disc jockey plays and jukebox plays, the last a key gauge of teenage taste while many stations still shunned rock. A combined Top 100 arrived in November 1955, topped first by the Four Aces.
The Hot 100 itself launched on August 4, 1958, with Ricky Nelson's Poor Little Fool at number one, and swiftly became the industry benchmark. Tom Noonan, Paul Ackerman and Seymour Stein created it, though Stein could not recall who picked the name. Two-sided hits caused recurring headaches: Elvis Presley's Don't Be Cruel and Hound Dog swapped top billing repeatedly on the older sales chart.
The singles rule proved the biggest problem. Through the 1990s No Doubt's Don't Speak led the airplay chart for 16 weeks and Natalie Imbruglia's Torn for 11, both shut out of the main list. Critics also accused labels of withholding a single until airplay peaked to engineer a high debut. On December 5, 1998, Billboard relented, turning its singles chart into a songs chart and cutting the retail share of the formula from 40 to 25 per cent.
Today rankings blend radio audience impressions from about 1,000 stations, digital and physical sales and streaming, tracked from Friday to Thursday, with each new chart published on Tuesday. By late September 2026 it had crowned 1,194 different number ones.
Source: Billboard Hot 100
