As an enthusiast of any and all kinds of music, the 1980s will always hold a special place in my heart. From country to hip-hop, rock to dance, and slow ballads to some of the most bombastic pop ever created, the decade was filled with a vast array of styles with a little bit of something for everyone. The Billboard Hot 100 was particularly spacious in this era: artists as old as Frank Sinatra were still able to reach the Top 40, and those as young as Kylie Minogue (still reaching the charts to this day) were just getting started. Artists born in Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, Norway, Trinidad, and New Zealand all reached the Top 10. Instrumental TV themes and show tunes turned into enormous hits, as did many covers of smashes from decades prior. In short, just about anything by anyone had the potential to strike it big.

The 80s was also a decade that the Billboard Hot 100 was uniquely qualified to accurately encapsulate. As the music purchasing/listening experience has evolved, the Hot 100 has had to adapt as well, to varied degrees of efficacy. Several eras have had their own particular hangups:

• The late 60s and early 70s saw the boom of double-A side singles; the Hot 100 initially allowed both sides of a single to chart in their own right, but their policy changed in 1969 to create a single entry comprising both sides of the record. This increased Billboard’s accuracy as a “singles chart”, but retroactively assessing the impact of individual songs is muddied by this reality.
• The 1990s on the charts will forever be defined by Billboard’s refusal to include songs on the Hot 100 which were not available for physical release. Numerous songs which by any metric (statistical or anecdotal) were huge and lasting hits of the era never appeared on the chart of record because of this rule. Billboard rectified this in 1998, making the Hot 100 a “songs chart” instead of a “singles chart.”
• Since the beginning of the 2000s, the music landscape has shifted at a rapid rate, with the rise and fall of the digital music marketplace giving way to the all-encompassing and harder-to-quantify streaming landscape. The Hot 100 has itself changed in many ways to try and accommodate these changes, from adding digital sales and streaming numbers as components of the chart to changing the way they weight these components against more traditional airplay. This methodology however has led to the chart seeing far fewer organic rises and falls on the charts, favoring giant first-week debuts (often centered around new album releases) and slow but steady declines down the chart.

This leaves the 80s as a rare relatively consistent 10-year stretch where radio airplay and a traditional A-side/B-side 7” single were still predominant forms of music consumption (12” maxi singles and cassette singles started to gain traction in the latter part of the decade but were still physical singles). As such, outside of the medley craze of the early 80s (still processed as one individual song, granted), virtually all of the singles to reach the Hot 100 in the decade were credited, experienced and understood as individual songs ranked weekly on the chart by their cumulative sales and airplay.

• One additional form of music consumption nascent in the 80s was the birth and growth of MTV, with the music video becoming arguably the strongest piece of promotion for any artist’s latest hit. While the Billboard charts could not incorporate video viewership into their chart calculations, video popularity spurred further record sales and airplay exposure, rather than outright replacing those avenues as future technologies would.

Additionally, Billboard had not yet established its recurrence rules on the Hot 100 yet.The vast majority of Hot 100 entries would peter out off the charts by the 20-week mark that would eventually define the chart’s criteria for recurrence, so the rules weren’t entirely necessary in this era. However, the songs that did make it past the 20-week mark were allowed to carve out unique runs of their own, whether it be re-entering the charts years after their initial run or spending a few extra months in the lower reaches of the charts while still in the public eye.

Thus, the 1980s is the decade that lends itself the best to a comprehensive historical analysis through the lens of the Billboard Hot 100. Over the past 15 years, I have thoroughly researched the chart and evaluated its entries via a methodology which rewards not only high peak positions, but long tenures as well. In addition to raw point totals that songs accumulated under this method, I have created multipliers for each year which allow each chapter of the chart’s history to be viewed as equally-weighted eras. As it pertains to the 80s, the early part of the decade was slightly more conducive to longer chart runs for the highest-performing songs. As such, songs from the late 80s will have a slightly larger value when compared to a song with an identical chart run in the early 80s.

With these multipliers in place, every artist to appear on the Hot 100 in the 1980s has been ranked via the cumulative era-equalized point totals of all their songs to reach the Hot 100. Starting from the bottom and working our way all the way up to the top artist of the decade, this project will tell the stories of every song by the 1,400+ artists to grace the Hot 100 in one of its most distinct decades.