The Lost Factor vs. Billboard’s Ghosted Hits

Throughout the two-and-a-half years of calculating a Lost Factor on 50 years of hit records, I’ve proceeded from the notion that Billboard’s year-end chart, despite the omission of some notable songs, was consistent and accurate enough to provide a benchmark. Those year-end points were divided by a recent week’s worth of airplay to get a sense of whether songs had endured.

Some very enduring songs indeed — from “Good Vibrations” to “Sweet Home Alabama” to “Purple Rain” – never made a year-end Top 100 … sometimes, but not always, because they came out at the end of the chart year. We know those songs are not lost. But there are also those songs that we’ve come to think of as defining “Lost 45s,” since Boston radio host Barry Scott coined that phrase in the 1980s. Some felt like big hits at the time (e.g, “Xanadu” or “Run Joey Run”). Some felt more like turntable hits; if they weren’t big enough to make the year-end chart to begin with, didn’t that just prove it? Some are in between, like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a song you might be hearing on the Nov. 10 anniversary of the tragedy that inspired it.

ROR reader Pat Kelly has a project of his own. He has calculated Top 100 charts from 1960 to 1989 that place songs in their peak years, rather than, say, allowing 1977’s “You Light Up My Life” to drift on to the Top 100 of 1978. Kelly based his algorithm on Billboard’s Greatest Hits of All-Time Chart. You can see his entire fascinating project here. There are 195 songs from the ’60s, 141 from the ’70s, and 85 hits from the ’80s that qualify.

Kelly also had a great name for those songs abandoned first by Billboard, then, perhaps by listeners — Ghosted Hits. Now I’ve calculated a Lost Factor for those songs as well, assigning year-end points based on where songs placed on Kelly’s remixed year-end, then dividing them by a week’s worth of spins from BDSradio’s monitored U.S. radio stations. As with my other Lost Factor rankings, because early-’60s titles were so dominant, I’ve divided the results into four time periods: 1980s, 1970s, 1965-69, and 1960-64.

The calculations were derived during BDSradio’s last week of operations in late October. Part of the reason for not including Canadian airplay, as I’ve done in the past, was because of the sheer number of Lost Factor projects that were completed before that deadline. (More about that below.) Canadian airplay sometimes buoys not just Canadian-content songs, but also a few unlikely international hits that endure in Quebec and Ottawa. But not even airplay in Francophone markets would have helped “Dominique” by the Singing Nun, the widely derided 1963 hit that would be tied for No. 3 if it had been included in our regular calculations.

Many of the patterns seen in other Lost Factor calculations hold — particularly the disappearance of songs by teen idols and female pop artists, including 1980s leaders Donna Summer and Olivia Newton-John. There are also my usual handful of “why is this lost” records, such as Al Green’s “You Ought to Be With Me.” Here are the ghosted Lost Factor leaders from the ’60s to the ’80s, beginning with 1960-64.

1965-69

1970-79

1980-89

Because the ghosted hits were calculated in, appropriately enough, Halloween week, I made an executive decision not to use the nine spins that “They’re Coming to Take Me Away” got in Halloween week, but the two from the week before. On the other hand, readers have chastened me for not calculating a perennial like “Monster Mash”’s Halloween airplay. Using Kelly’s numbers from 1962, when that song did not make the year end (it did in 1973), it would have well outperformed its chart points with an 0.12 LF.

Then there’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” A decade ago, that song became a secret weapon for some programmers. These days, the Gordon Lightfoot song has a Lost Factor of 11; (anything over a 1.0 can be considered “Lost.”) That number would be lower, but not sharply so, if we included Canadian airplay or airplay from today’s anniversary of the real-life tragedy that inspired the song.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, the Lost Factor has had neither a coda nor a dedication. Thus far, we’ve published data through 2002. With a hard stop coming, I was also able to complete 2003-09, taking us into an era of songs that are beyond the purview of Classic Hits stations, but still featured on Hot AC and Top 40 radio. Look for a Top 100 of 2000-09 as well as a slightly updated 1960-2009 as well. It’s a logical stopping place, especially as a new generation starts to change out the songs in the eternal jukebox, still influenced by radio, but also by input from far beyond it.

The dedication is to Adam Foster, the product director of BDSradio parent Luminate, who died after a three-year battle with ALS on Oct 13. Foster helped facilitate a lot of the data seen in Ross on Radio stories, particularly our annual summary of how many hits each radio format had over the previous year. I am also grateful to readers such as Kelly and Josh Hosler who took the time to share their own calculations, and to you for your support. Look for more in the next few weeks.