Billboard's Top 5 Pop Singles Introduction

An introduction to Billboard's Top 5 popular singles or songs from 1946 to 1977.

BILLBOARD'S TOP 5 POPULAR SINGLES FROM 1946 TO 1977

The Billboard national music charts, which cost the magazine $300,000 a year to prepare, are compiled weekly, based on information gathered in phone calls to dealers and distributors (and radio stations for the record charts) all across the country. Once the responses have been fed into and released from a computer, Billboard's director of marketing services sorts out the information, including suggested chart positions for all entered albums and records, makes additional survey calls to key accounts, and then organizes the final weekly chart figures.