A comment on survival of the hippest: life at the top of the hot 100

Abstract

Giles (2007) analysed the survival characteristics of musical recordings that reached ‘number one hit’ spot in the US popular music charts over the period 1955 to 2003. From the empirical analyses of data from the Billboard Hot 100 chart, he concluded that a number one hit's ‘life at the top’ is enhanced significantly if it is recorded by a female solo artist, if it is an instrumental piece or if it is able to ‘bounce back’ for a second spell. We found that, however, the data set he used contains a number of errors in it. In this article, we have corrected such errors and obtained the more reliable results about the survival characteristics of number one hit songs. In addition to these corrections, we have asked five new different questions to the corrected data set to investigate if there are any other survival characteristics that Giles (2007) did not indicate in his article.

Keywords:

• survival analysis
• survival characteristics of musical recordings
• pop music markets
• Billboard Hot 100 chart

JEL Classification:

• C41
• C32
• C53