Billboard published its first Hot 100 chart
On this day · 4 August 1958
On a single August day in 1958, America's hit songs got one unified scoreboard — and pop has been ranked by it ever since.
On August 4, 1958, Billboard magazine published its first Hot 100, a single ranking that fused the ways a record could be popular: store sales, radio airplay, and jukebox spins. Before it, the trade paper ran several competing lists, leaving no clear answer to a simple question — what was the biggest song in the country this week?
The new chart, championed by editor Paul Ackerman, gave the music business one authoritative tabulation. The inaugural No. 1 was Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool,” which edged out Pérez Prado’s “Patricia” to top the very first list of 100 titles.
The Hot 100 quickly became the industry’s standard measure of a hit.
Nearly seven decades on, the Hot 100 still defines a song’s commercial peak in the United States, now blending streaming counts with sales and airplay. A No. 1 on it remains one of the most coveted milestones in popular music — a direct descendant of that 1958 experiment in measuring what listeners loved most.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
