Musical Tastes of the ’60s and Problems with Record Charts

I recently completed a small case study concerning the Beatles in the charts, and I found some really interesting things about the top records of the ’60s. It has been quite educational about the uses and pitfalls of using chart rankings, especially journalistic summaries. Today I’m going to tell you about a few of my discoveries, because it’s really important for both academics and music journalists to be aware of the pitfalls.

I know a lot about ’60s music. It’s not my specialty, but I can tell you way more about the ’60s than the ’70s, for instance. You probably have a pretty good idea of who the most popular artists were, what kind of music was popular. This is a subject that gets a little bit of attention.

So, I was surprised when I dug into some of the year-end charts for the US and UK and found that soundtrack albums—specifically, musicals—were consistently the best-selling albums of the decade.

Do you know how many “top albums of the sixties” lists I’ve read, by country? How many lists of all-time best sellers? Do you know how many of them mention The Sound of Music? NOT MANY. The hills are alive with the sound of neglect.

But it turns out that, as of 2015, The Sound of Music still holds the honor of being the #2 album of all-time in the US. Not in terms of sales—I think Grease is actually the best selling musical—but in terms of chart performance. (More on this later.) It charted better than Thriller, with an initial run of 206 weeks (a number which includes non-consecutive dates in 1968, as far as I’m aware, but it still had at least consecutive three years in the charts). In the UK, its initial run was 304 weeks. All time, it’s had 374 weeks. For perspective, the most successful Beatles album to date is Sgt. Pepper. Even its all-time weeks on chart doesn’t match Sound of Music‘s initial run. It’s had 272 weeks in history, and its initial run was 52 weeks (in the UK).

When journalists discuss the most successful albums and artists of all time, they are often focused on, shall we say, original acts. Not cast recordings or original soundtracks, which are somewhat dismissively categorized under “various artists.” But these albums are also pop albums, of original music by a single composer. If Britney Spears can qualify as a solo artist when she didn’t write any of her own music or lyrics, then so should Broadway scores, no? We let Gershwin and Cole Porter have the honor of primary credit.

But I think the issue is less “authenticity” or “originality” and more an issue of crediting. Are Rogers & Hammerstein the top pop artists? Or Julie Andrews? Do we always need to consider them separately? I dunno. But it does make it tricky to give a consistent credit when creating artist lists, and I suspect that’s why “various artist” recordings are neglected. It’s a complication that we just mumble past, instead of doing the work.

At a glance, though, the Billboard year-end top albums charts give a nice capsule view of how drastically musical tastes changed over the decade. These are the #1 albums for each year:

1960. The Sound of Music (case recording) 1961. Camelot (cast recording) 1962. West Side Story (soundtrack) 1963. West Side Story (soundtrack) 1964. Hello, Dolly! (cast recording) 1965. Mary Poppins (soundtrack)  1966. Whipped Cream and Other Delights – Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass 1967. More of The Monkees -The Monkees 1968. Are You Experienced – The Jimi Hendrix Experience 1969. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida – Iron Butterfly

However, read this with the caveat that singles, by far, dominated record sales before about 1965, when the industry started moving toward LPs. Singles were usually not released for showtunes/soundtracks, so, if someone wanted those songs, they had to buy the album. That’s 1) why showtunes are absent from singles charts, 2) probably why soundtracks and cast recordings had higher sales than other pop albums. It was the only sales unit available! Whereas if someone loved “Please Please Me,” there’s a good chance they bought the single and not the LP, especially if they were teenagers with only so much money to spend on records (I’m extrapolating, I don’t have the data for this offhand). So it’s vital to look at both singles and albums charts for this decade.

Interestingly, the #1 single for each year doesn’t so much reflect the cultural shift. They’re consistently either easy-listening or bubble gum pop. I wonder if this reflects the combined forces of teeny-boppers and their parents buying records? (I mean, in 1969, your mom was probably more likely to buy “Sugar, Sugar” than “Crosstown Traffic.”)

Now, let’s go back to metrics of success. I said that The Sound of Music is the #2 album of all-time but not the best selling album. Chart positions are determined relative to whatever else was released at the time. So out of 20 albums, if 19 of them sell 100 copies and my album sells 102, then I’m the #1 album. There’s no fixed criteria for the rankings, so #1s are not created equally.

The Beatles show this well. The top 5 best-selling singles of the ’60s in the UK were:

1. She Loves You – The Beatles
2. I Want To Hold Your Hand – The Beatles
3. Tears – Ken Dodd
4. Can’t Buy Me Love – The Beatles
5. I Feel Fine – The Beatles

Here’s a graph (created with MusicID) of #1 Beatles singles with the five longest chart runs (during the decade), with “I Feel Fine” thrown in for reference:

As you can see, “I Feel Fine” (the lavender line), which was the 5th best-selling song of the decade (as well as we know; sales data usually has a large margin of error), but wasn’t in the charts as long as many other #1s, and “From Me to You” (the violet line), which was in the charts 2nd longest, isn’t in the top 5 best-sellers. On the other hand, “She Loves You” is #1 in both respects. The takeaway is, more weeks in chart/weeks at #1 often correlates with higher sales, but not always (which we can see in the showdown between The Sound of Music and Grease).

So when you look at lists of chart milestones and records and you see a million different criteria (artist with most #1s, artist with most weeks at #1, artist with best-selling #1, etc), all with different answers, this is why. There are a lot of ways to evaluate success. Be wary of any “Top Records” list that doesn’t make its criteria explicit.