Who was the greatest song chart act of all time?
When comparing the success of individual songs it is important to uncouple the influence that the number of available charts has on the result. If we are comparing the annual performance of each artist against their contemporaries then much of this bias can be smoothed out, because the values are generated from the same set of charts. However, when looking at the overall career of an artist spanning a number of years a better way to remove the bias has to be found. One way to do this for songs and albums is to use an artist’s annual positions. That approach tells us which artist did best over a range of years, but it takes no account of how impressive chart success was in any one year. It is also worth exploring another approach. The plot above shows the annually accumulated score for the top artists. This gives an impression of the trends but, the varying number of entries in each year prevents real comparison across the years. A better comparison is to look at what percentage of the
