Quote:
Originally Posted by Macfan4life
A song's success is calculated more by weeks on charts than peak position. Of course everyone wants bragging rights to have #1 or land inside the top 10. But a hit is calculated by weeks on charts.
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You got a point. Articles usually mention peak positions but hardly mention weeks on chart, which is very important, if not more important than the peak position. One can easily remember the peak position of a favorite song, but not the weeks in the top 100, 20 or 10. If you ask me, I don't remember those numbers from any song, though I do remember The Dark Side of the Moon album, which spent almost 1000 non-consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200, so it's the all-time record for longevity (and that's why I remember, besides it's one of my favorite albums), or so I read.
I don't remember Rumours weeks but now that it's easy to find the info, I see it spent 1,160 weeks on the UK Albums Chart (making it the longest-charting studio album in UK history) and well over 600 weeks on the US Billboard 200 (alongside 31 non-consecutive weeks at #1 in Billboard). I'm not sure if those numbers encompass just the album's momentum, or also the weeks it returned to the charts years later, including this century.
I guess radios that play 70s to 90s music check the #1 lists and play the songs from those lists more often, they don't do deeper research which could bring us forgotten songs that were popular at one time.