How Does Billboard Rank Songs?
The Billboard country chart uses “audience impressions” to rank country songs. A company called BDS (owned by the Nielsen company, which also owns Billboard) monitors airplay at 126 stations (the number changes a couple of times a year, but it’s almost always a little over 120 stations) in the largest radio markets in the country. They figure out how many people heard the song each time it’s played – if you know how Nielsen ranks TV shows, by monitoring a sample of viewers they consider typical and then calculating how many watchers each show has, then you are familiar with the idea of “audience share.” BDS just has to multiply each spin a song gets by the audience share (in millions of people) that spin received, and add ‘em all up to arrive at a total of “audience impressions” for each song. And the song with the highest total audience on the 126 stations on the Billboard country panel is ranked #1. The song with the 30th biggest audience is ranked #30. They don’t just count up the s
