Billboard has been publishing weekly rankings in one form or another for more than a century.
Early in the 1900s, Billboard presented charts detailing the popularity of sheet music in the U.S. In July 1940, Billboard unveiled its first chart ranking the sales of recorded songs, the 10-position “National List of Best Selling Retail Records,” with Bing Crosby, Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller among its ranks.
Billboard expanded its number of weekly charts over the next few years, starting recaps for R&B in 1942 and country in 1944. In March 1956, the weekly Billboard 200 albums chart premiered (at just 10 positions deep). Two years later, in August 1958, the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart began.
At the end of 1958, Billboard printed a recap of the year’s biggest songs for the first time (that year also encompassing songs’ performance on pre-Hot 100 charts leading up to its launch that August). Domenico Modugno’s “Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu)” finished as Billboard‘s first year-end No. 1 Hot 100 song. The track, which spent five weeks at No. 1, became the second song to top the weekly Hot 100, after Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool.”
Also in the 1958 year-end issue, Billboard continued its tradition of surveying the music industry via “The Billboard Eleventh Annual Disc Jockey Poll,” which “Volare” also crowned. “[The song] was really a left-field hit … one of the few disks in recent years with a non-English lyric to reach the top,” Billboard wrote at the time. In the 2020s, such hits are plentiful, largely via the growth of K-pop and Latin music. Thus, this line from that 1958 issue proved prophetic, given the sonic and geographic scope of that year’s biggest titles: “The preference in tunes indicates that no one type of song or artist reigns supreme among jockeys. The list also includes several types of songs with many extremes, ranging from an old folk song to European, Latin American and tunes by American cleffers.”
Today, Billboard not only has the year-end Hot 100 Songs ranking, but also annual recaps for all 200-plus weekly charts, reflecting chart performance of songs, albums and artists over a 12-month tracking period.
From “Volare” to this year, here’s a look at every year-end No. 1 Hot 100 single since 1958, as published in every year-end issue.
Additional research by Gary Trust, Paul Grein and Alex Vitoulis
