How Are Songs Removed From the Billboard Chart?
Country radio doesn’t want to see songs staying on the charts forever. It may be true in a given week that Toby Keith’s As Good As I Once Was, a giant hit in 2005, is still getting more airplay than the current #48 song, but, in order to run their businesses effectively, country radio wants to know which are the most popular current songs. So Billboard has to have rules to keep the chart current without making arbitrary decisions to remove songs that are still gaining audience. (The main chart is called the “current” chart, and the process of removing a song from the current chart is called moving a song to “recurrent” status.) The rules are complicated.
