Joel Whitburn criticism: chart fabrication, misrepresentation of sources, cherry picking

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originally published on 3 March 2013; revised on 12 November 2015; latest edit: 19  September 2023

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In a review titled “A Discographic Deception,” dated July 13, 1987, by expert discographer and sound historian Tim Brooks, of the notorious but influential venture into acoustic-era popular music chart fabrication by Joel Whitburn in his 1986 book Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music, the author exposes flaws in Whitburn’s research methodology, and reveals numerous instances of Whitburn’s astonishingly bad habit of mispresentating sources. In case after case, according to Brooks’ analysis, Whitburn’s cited sources contain nothing like what he says they do, and specifically do not contain the periodic “lists of top popular recordings,” sales data, or ranking information he attributes to them, and which might have contributed to the chart data he claims to have derived from them. Whitburn’s source of “sheet music sales” data for acoustic-era recordings is unidentified. An edited version of response letter from Joel Whitburn, and a rebuttal by Brooks, follow the review.

Quotes from the 13 July 1987 Tim Brooks review “A Discographic Deception,” regarding Whitburn’s Pop Memories 1890-1954:

…it must be said, the entire book is a colossal fraud.

But wait, you say, you didn’t know there were any popular charts in 1890? You are right. Whitburn simply made them up.

The great danger is that Whitburn’s apparently precise data, with its impressive looking sources, will be reprinted and enshrined as historical fact by others. This has already begun to happen…Whitburn has certainly been misleading in not making it clear that his “charts” are entirely speculative, and, as we have seen, none too accurate.

In a later scathing 26 November 1989* review/exposé by Tim Brooks of Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories the author wrote,

This is a dangerous book…Here we have a whole book full of misleading information, presented in such a factual, almost statistical manner that it is bound to be quoted.

From the introduction of the book Popular American Recording Pioneers:1895-1925 by Tim Gracyk with Frank Hoffmann (2012), p. 11:

A few writers in recent years, following the example of Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories: 1890-1954 (Record Research Inc., 1986), have cited precise chart numbers for early recordings — what records after being released were number one, number two, number three, and so on. It is a deplorable trend, and I never refer to chart positions. Primary sources provide no basis for assigning chart numbers. No company files tell us precise numbers; trade journals never systematically ranked records…

At no time in the acoustic era was enough information compiled or made available about sales for anyone today to create accurate charts or rank best-sellers, and the further back in time we go, the more difficulty we have in identifying hits. Even if one had access to sales figures of the 1890s, a chart of hits means little for an era when records of many popular titles were made in the hundreds, not thousands or millions…

All chart positions concerning recordings of the acoustic recording era are fictitious, and since they mislead novice collectors, they do much harm.

Billboard published the first singles popularity charts in 1940 (see the section “History, methods and description” in the Wikipedia article on Billboard charts). The Hit Parade chart first published in 1936 seems to have been something else, though the Wikipedia article on Billboard chart history contains contradictory definitions of the term hit parade. Wikipedia’s article on the term Hit parade begins by saying it is a ranked list of the most popular recordings at a certain point in time, but subsequently states that through the late 1940s the term hit parade referred to a list of compositions, since “In those times, when a tune became a hit, it was typically recorded by several different artists.” The latter use of the term suggests that the Billboard Hit Parade charts from 1936 to 1939 may have only ranked songs, rather than individual recordings, according to their popularity. I’ve yet to find any of these early Billboard Hit Parade charts online.

In section 1.4 of the article Review of Irving Berlin: A Life In Song, by Philip Furia, by music theorist and historian David Carson Berry, published in the Volume 6, Number 5, November 2000 issue of the journal Music Theory Online, the author says (link and italics added):

Beginning in 1935 (nearly three decades after Berlin’s first song), Your Hit Parade was broadcast on radio (and later on television); it offered a national survey, with chart positions based on various factors including sales of records and sheet music (although its evolving rankings formula was never clearly articulated). Thus, from 1935 onward, one can at least say that a song was number X according to that particular source. For songs released beforehand, however, there is no consistent way to derive such a ranking. Variety and other publications may provide ad hoc sales figures, or print very specific charts (for example, of record sales by a given company in a given market), but they offer nothing that would enable one to say, so generally, that a song was “number X” nationally.

From where did the national (US) chart positions for years prior to 1935 or 1936, that can now be found all over the web, come from? As outlined above, they sprang from the imagination of Joel Whitburn. There were no national charts during this era for best-selling or most popular records; therefore, no national chart positions. Why make them up?

Popular websites which routinely and extensively incorporate Joel Whitburn’s fabricated pre-1936 “chart” figures include:

• Wikipedia
• MusicVF.com
• JazzStandards.com
• TSort.info — via “charts” drawn from bullfrogspond.com, a site which is presently down

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Links to the aforementioned reviews and articles, and other relevant criticism

Pre-1936 popular music chart fabrication, and misrepresentation of sources:

• Tim Brooks July 13, 1987 review, titled “A Discographic Deception,” of the Joel Whitburn book Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (1986)
  • “But wait, you say, you didn’t know there were any popular charts in 1890? You are right. Whitburn simply made them up.“
  • “…the entire book is a colossal fraud.“

• Tim Brooks, 26 November 1989 review of the Joel Whitburn book Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (1986)
  • “This is a dangerous book“
  • “Here we have a whole book full of misleading information, presented in such a factual, almost statistical manner that it is bound to be quoted.“

• The Mainspring Press Record Collectors Blog (link broken as of 30 January 2017)
  • “The charts referred to were actually fabricated by pop-culture writer Joel Whitburn, and were quickly recognized by astute collectors and researchers as fictitious.”

• Popular American Recording Pioneers:1895-1925 by Tim Gracyk with Frank Hoffmann (2012), p. 11 (intro.)
  • “precise chart numbers for early recordings…a deplorable trend” 
  • “All chart positions concerning recordings of the acoustic recording era are fictitious, and since they mislead novice collectors, they do much harm.“

• from Review of Irving Berlin: A Life In Song, by Philip Furia, section 1.4, by music theorist and historian David Carson Berry, published in the Volume 6, Number 5, November 2000 issue of the journal Music Theory Online.
  • (referring to Pop Memories 1890-1954, by Joel Whitburn) There is much misinformation to be found in books like this, however, which fabricate single-number chart positions; rankings often are based on sources that may have reported company-biased or only regional information, and, in extreme cases, information may be merely anecdotal.
    

Fictitious chart performance profiles for mid to late 1950s recordings, created by combining cherry-picked data from multiple charts:

•  forum at elvis-collectors.com; 21 November 2011 thread (quoting user Herkenrath)
  • “Whitburn doesn’t only cherry-pick the peak positions but all other chart information as well. He takes the peak from one chart, weeks spent on chart from a different chart…He does it this way for every record charted in any of these [Billboard pop] charts between 1955 and 1958. So what you see in Joel Whitburn’s books for that period is indeed a cherry-picking from four different charts published by Billboard during that era.“

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* The article at timbrooks.net is dated November 26, 1989. However, the page URL bears the date 1990, and a note at the bottom of the page, following the article and its ten footnotes, indicates that the page, which consists almost entirely of the review, was “last modified on November 5th, 2011.”