What was the greatest chart song of all time?
We all have personal opinions about which is the best song ever released, the 265,814 song chart entries that are used to create these lists can contribute to that debate but are focused on the charts we have. The simple approach, even when it is as tuned as the one used for the main chart, has too much dependance on the input charts and makes it hard to compare one period with another. The plot above shows the number of entries in the 96 source song charts. The preponderance of entries after 1960 means that any acts active after that time would be liable to over representation in any combined results. As a result it is important to weigh results by year in an attempt to cancel the effect of the smaller number of entries in early charts. A number of different approaches have been tried, and actually the top songs tend to be so far ahead of the rest that the technique used makes little difference to the order. For the plot above the average of the scores for the songs in the positions 1
