In Britain, we are reaching our 1000th number one single. When will other countries reach their 1000th number one single?

griffinj

According to "Pop Memeories 1890-1954" by Joel Whitburn, there were 898 Number one singles in the U.S. that 65 years. Sadly, I do not have the subsequent volume, but I think a fair guess would be that the U.S. has had around 1600 number one singles in the 114 years of record keeping. (No pun intended) p.s. Between 1942 and 1961 separate charts for R&B, country, pop, and "adult comtemporary" (I'm not sure what that is) were spun off. Presumably there are now charts for hip-hop, dance, etc. Can there only be one number one at a time? Dec 24 04, 6:55 AM

gmackematix

By number one single we, in the UK at least, generally mean the single at the top of the pop record charts. The first widely accepted chart here was the NME chart which began in November 1952, although Record Retailer and Melody Maker have since become more favoured by the music industry. The songs in these charts do not tend to differ much. Since 1952, there have been 997 number ones at the time of writing. The US certainly didn't have a pop record chart in the 1890s and when the US Billboard Chart began in 1940 it was still grouping various versions of one song together so didn't list number ones as we know them. I think 1600 is therefore a slight overestimate for the US chart. Clearly a song being number one in a specialist chart like dance, country and so on is an irrelevance to our consideration of national number ones. It's funny how this sort of question always draws a blank on foreign countries. Can none of our multilingual readers find a list of say French, German or Italian number ones on the Net? Dec 25 04, 8:32 PM