Ten years ago, I started a project to document and listen to the progress of popular radio from its beginnings in 1925 to the present (well, 2014 at that time). I grabbed a database of Billboard annual rankings and created a Spotify playlist for each year up through 2012. The particulars of the endeavor were laid out in a post from December 2014.
I made it as far as creating all of the Spotify playlists and a couple of posts recapping the 1920’s, but then it got abandoned. Since I am starving for content in this #100DaysToOffload challenge, I figured that I’d dredge it up again.
There are a couple of hurdles that I need to overcome.
First, I don’t have the list of Billboard songs anymore (at least I don’t think I do), and the site that provided it was forced to stop sharing it years ago. So, if I plan on taking things past 2012, I’ll need to do a little research.
Second, while I was able to update the YouTube links in the old posts for ones that no longer worked, there are a lot of Spotify tunes in the playlists that don’t play anymore. So, I will need to go through all the playlists and update them.
Finally, while the title of this project is “90 Years of Top 40 Music,” it’s been ten years since it began. So, I’m going to have to re-name it “100 Years of Top 40 Music.”
UPDATE: I found that Spotify kinda sucks for finding music and making shareable playlists of songs from the 1920’s. So, I’m going back and changing them to YouTube playlists.
Here are the original posts: