Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Your Hit Parade number-one singles


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Consensus is keep and rename. 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 18:26, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

List of Your Hit Parade number-one singles

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I am proposing this list article's deletion due to the impossibility of locating reliable sources listing number-one singles from the Your Hit Parade program.

The reason no such source exists is simple: Your Hit Parade was never a singles chart, nor did it ever aspire to be. The program tabulated and presented the most popular songs of the day -- and though this distinction may seem silly, nitpicky, or negligible to the modern music fan, in the 1930s the difference was quite significant indeed.

Today, and indeed for most of the history of the music industry since the late 1950s, a hit song is associated almost exclusively with a single definitive recording by the artist who released it. This has been the case for so long that it's now difficult to imagine it having been any other way, but in fact from the inception of the music industry up through the early- to mid-1940s it was a profoundly different situation: songs came to prominence not through the release and promotion of recordings, but by performances (by numerous musicians and ensembles rather than a sole act) in vaudeville and theater, on radio broadcasts, and in film. Recordings of hit songs on 78 RPM singles tended to follow, not precede, the songs' rise to popularity, and it was not unusual for a hit song to become popular despite no noteworthy recordings of it ever being released.

Editors of this article have attempted to circumvent this reality by falsely, and without citation, claiming that the proprietary formula used by the producers of Your Hit Parade aimed to "determine the sales rankings of 78 rpm singles." In truth, it was sales of sheet music, along with radio broadcast, that appeared to be the dominant factors constituting the program's rankings; criticism of the program tended to charge that its formula in fact underrepresented 78 RPM record sales and jukebox play as indicators of song popularity. (See Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century, Volume I by Edward Foote Gardner, Paragon House, 2000, page x.) Suggesting that the listed records were the number-one "singles" during this period is therefore misleading in the extreme -- though this did not stop the editors from trying to use the program's notability to generate such a list, along with the compulsory "statistics and trivia" section that editors of charts-related Wikipedia articles unfortunately seem to adore compiling.

Apparently this was possible largely by relying on only one source (which, to the editors' credit, was at least tagged as being potentially unreliable), a self-published PDF from "Arts & Charts," which appears to be a one-man operation generating indexes of the record charts (real, imaginary, or in this case misinterpreted) in the style of Joel Whitburn's. This document, which copies its introduction section from the text of Wikipedia, appears to reproduce the actual song rankings from Your Hit Parade (though I would need to check against a reliable source to be sure) but list them with the prominent recording artists who released them as singles at the time. This effort would be one that the broadcast and recording industry historian Tim Brooks might describe, like Whitburn's deeply flawed Pop Memories tome, as having been produced for the entertainment of those who "don’t care where the numbers come from, as long as they have numbers." (See Brooks's 2001 review, published in the ARSC Journal and available online, of the Gardner title I mentioned above.)

If Your Hit Parade is not a suitable source to catalog the "number-one singles" of the period, might there be an alternative? Unfortunately, no. At the time, trade papers like Variety and Metronome tended to rank the popular tunes of the day by sheet music sales and radio broadcasts -- which makes sense given that at the time, this was a songs-, not records-oriented business. When these publications did attempt to rank top-selling records, these tended to be grouped by region or by label, often based on information provided not through surveys but by the labels themselves. Attempts to "translate" this spotty and sometimes less-than-impartial information into national "charts" that resemble what Billboard publishes today, like Whitburn's aforementioned Pop Memories, have been panned by historians like Brooks, Tim Gracyk, and Allan Sutton along with the journalist Will Friedwald. (See Brooks's 1990 review of Pop Memories in the ARSC Journal, available online; Gracyk's Popular American Recording Pioneers, The Haworth Press, 2000, page 1; Sutton's Recording the Twenties, Mainspring Press, 2008, page 307; Friedwald's "The Whitburning of Classic Pop" in The Village Voice, December 20, 1994, page 8.) The first national chart of actual record popularity in the U.S. was published by Billboard in 1940 (not coincidentally, at a time when the industry was beginning to orient itself gradually toward promoting specific recordings, rather than songs more broadly).

Can this list article be salvaged? Maybe. It would have to be 100% crystal clear that the number-one songs listed were indeed songs, not singles -- this could be done by listing not the artists proffered by the unreliable "Arts & Charts" source, but each song's songwriters and publishing company. This information could be gleaned from proper sources, like Your Hit Parade & American Top 10 Hits by Bruce C. Elrod, Popular Culture Inc., 1994, among other reference works. And of course the misguided statistics/trivia section would need to be deleted entirely.

I apologize for my long-winded and perhaps excessively detailed explanation, but I wanted to ensure that those less familiar with nuances of the early music industry and song popularity charts could understand exactly where I'm coming from.

tl;dr: This article is based on one lousy source and badly misrepresents the nature of the program it is based on. There are no suitable substitutes for American "number-one singles" of this period. Salvaging the contents of the article would require changing its topic entirely and basing it on proper sources.

This list article, along with the associated category 1930s record charts (which contains it and no other articles), should be deleted. Mmrsofgreen (talk) 04:09, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Delete This clearly goes against WP:RS. Thank you for your explanation, as well. BonkHindrance (talk) 04:19, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 05:43, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Albums and songs-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 05:43, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Music-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 05:43, 17 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Keep - I don't see an actual WP:DELREASON here. Nom's problem appears to be with the title of the article, and this appears resolvable by renaming it to List of Your Hit Parade number-one songs. With such a title this article would clearly meet WP:GNG and WP:LISTN based on the following sources: 0 1 2 3 4. I did consider a merge to Your Hit Parade but this would clearly result in an overly-long article.
 * At present the article is sourced to a single source that is clearly unreliable (it cites Wikipedia as its source). However the Your Hit Parade No. One was reported in newspapers and so-forth, and it appears that the books "Your hit parade: April 20, 1935 to June 7, 1958 : American top 10 hits, 1958-1984" and "I've heard those songs before: the weekly top ten tunes for the past fifty years" includes the No. One in its listings, and therefore if copies could be obtained the list could be populated with data from another source. In fact, I think the present source is probably copied from "Your hit parade: April 20, 1935 to June 7, 1958 : American top 10 hits".
 * TL;DR - A review of the sources shows that the song that was number one on Your Hit Parade was clearly considered notable. Issues with the list are fixable per WP:NEXIST. FOARP (talk) 09:19, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As the user who proposed the deletion, I'll say that I do think the solution you describe here would be acceptable. I was not aware of the mechanics of changing an article's topic or title, merely assuming that starting over with a modified topic would require this one first being deleted; for this I apologize.


 * The sources you describe would be acceptable, and I think I've seen them in my local library, though I don't know how much time I will have in the near future to go through them and verify each listed song and date. I will say, though, that merely changing the article's title and subbing in a proper source would not fix the article, as it would still misrepresent the Your Hit Parade countdown as a singles, not songs, chart. References to recording artists and record labels would need to be dropped and perhaps substituted, as I noted in my original nomination, with songwriters and publishing companies. Fortunately, this information is readily available in certain reference works, including the Gardner book I mentioned (which I personally own).


 * Finally, if this article is kept with a modified topic/title, there would be no logical reason to stop the list at the week before Billboard debuted its record chart in 1940, as it does now. The program continued to air through 1959; the only reason the current article stops where it does is because it (falsely) presents the chart as a predecessor to the record charts that debuted in Billboard that year. (Your Hit Parade in reality could be considered a predecessor to that publication's Honor Roll of Hits listing that debuted 1945 and ran until 1963. That songs chart was actually considered the magazine's flagship and most prestigious chart for much of the time that it was published, at least until the Hot 100 came around -- however, it is seldom mentioned today precisely because it is a songs, not singles, chart, and is therefore less comprehensible by the modern Whitburn-/Hot 100-dominated conception of U.S. "chart history.") Mmrsofgreen (talk) 18:53, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * To rename an article follow the process described in WP:RM. Rescoping the article to include hits later than the ones it currently has is an article content issue to discuss on the article's talk page (or even just make your own WP:BOLD edits). WP:NODEADLINE is an important rule on Wiki so I wouldn't be concerned about not having the time right now to fix this. Having gone through the listings presently on the page, in as much as they can be confirmed form other sources, it appears accurate so I don't have any WP:V concerns. FOARP (talk) 08:48, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * @Mmrsofgreen PS - some additional comments regarding this article: whilst the radio show might not play the record by the artist who popularised the song that made their number one that week, it is pretty clear which artist was responsible for popularising it. For example, does anyone doubt that Glenn Miller was behind songs that he had popularised dominating the top spot in the chart for four months running in June-September 1939? Certainly the list of Glenn Miller "Top Tens" (now cited in the article) credits this to him and his band. Maybe we need to explain better in the list that this is different to simple record sales, but I think the artists who popularised the songs each week still deserve mention if this can be supported in a reliable source. FOARP (talk) 08:56, 21 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Keep and rename, per FOARP. Rlendog (talk) 15:24, 21 February 2020 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.