By Geoff Mayfield, Billboard Director of Charts
Please note that the information below pertains to all of Billboard's Year In Music charts, only a fraction of which appear in this special Billboard.com section. The full breadth of charts appear in the pages of Billboard's special double issue dated Dec. 24, 2005, and on Billboard.biz, where subscribers have full access to all of the year-end tallies.
The vast array of Year In Music charts boil down to simple math. We simply add up numbers that build our weekly album and song charts -- most of those based on sales tracked by Nielsen SoundScan or radio information compiled by Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems -- to tell you who was hot in 2005.
The standings from these tabulations also determine winners at the Billboard Music Awards, broadcast each year on Fox.
In many years, the leaders are easy to predict, like this year, when 50 Cent's "The Massacre" was No. 1 for six weeks on The Billboard 200, or last year, when Usher led that chart for nine weeks.
But on other occasions longevity, more than peak position, determines success. Consider 2001, when Lifehouse's "Hanging By a Moment" was the year's No. 1 Hot 100 entry although the song did not spend a single week atop the chart.
The rankings for BDS- and SoundScan-based charts only reflect airplay or sales during the weeks a title appeared on a relevant chart from the 2005 chart year -? which began with the issue dated Dec. 4, 2004, and ended with the Billboard of Nov. 26, 2005. That detail, and the December-November time period, account for some of the differences between these lists and annual recaps that are compiled independently by either of those data sources.
Artist, imprint, label and distributor categories for all genres reflect accumulated chart performance for all titles on the pertinent chart.
The umbrella "label" categories refer to the distributing labels and/or promotion labels that are listed on our weekly charts. If only one label appears on a chart listing, that company will be tallied as both an "imprint" and a "label" for that title.
Among changes that have occurred since the 2004 Year In Music issue:
• Completion of the Sony/BMG merger yields new entities among distributors (Sony BMG Sales Enterprise) and in the categories of Latin (Sony BMG Norte), classical (Sony BMG Masterworks) and Christian (Provident-Integrity).
• Bad Boy moved from Universal Music Group to Warner Music Group, but titles handled by the former did not affect the chart standings of the latter's companies.
• New to the Year In Music menu are the Pop 100, Hot Digital Songs and Hot Adult R&B, although the last mentioned has long been a staple of Billboard Radio Monitor.
Year-end rankings for all album charts and all singles-sales charts are determined by accumulating the SoundScan units for each week titles appeared on the appropriate chart (including, for charts that are published bi-weekly, units from the unpublished weeks). Similarly, the ringtone recap represents accumulated sales measured by Nielsen Mobile.
Catalog albums are titles that are two years old and have fallen below the top half of The Billboard 200. Since a title can move from current to catalog status during the chart year, there may be cases in our Year in Music recaps where an album appears on both title lists.
Rankings for modern rock, mainstream rock, adult contemporary and adult top-40 categories are based on accumulated BDS-monitored plays for each week a title appeared on the chart. Similarly, the Hot 100 Airplay, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, Hot Country Songs and Hot Latin Songs (and the three related Latin-format-airplay charts) are determined by adding up the total number of gross impressions, as determined by BDS, for each week a track charted.
The Billboard Hot 100, Pop 100 and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs categories reflect accumulated radio and sales points, based specifically on BDS and SoundScan, respectively.
Hot Soundtrack Singles are the top ranked Hot 100 songs in cases when the song's success can be directly traced to its inclusion on the soundtrack to a movie or TV show.
For the pop, country and R&B/hip-hop categories that combine data from album charts and singles charts, formulas have been weighted so that the sales units tallied on The Billboard 200, Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and Top Country Albums, respectively, have parity with the specific chart points that construct each week's Billboard Hot 100, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Hot Country Songs.
The new-artist categories contain acts that did not have an album on the market prior to October 2004. Charting a single prior to October 2004 does not disqualify an artist, unless that act received enough chart points to show up on a new-artist list in a previous Year in Music issue. Solo artists from groups that have previously charted are also considered new artists.
The Dance/Club Play rankings are based on an inverse point system, with titles collecting points based on rank for each week they were on the chart.
The publishing categories show accumulated points for all charted songs on the applicable weekly charts. If a song is held by more than one publisher, points are divided equally between those companies.
In the Publishing Corporation category, parent companies receive 100% of the points from publishers in which they own at least 50% equity and 25% of the points compiled by publishers that they administer but do not own.
Some of the charts in this spotlight, where indicated, run deeper in billboard.biz. Additional year-end charts not included in this issue also appear there, with lists for Top Comprehensive Albums, Top Rap Albums, Top Compilation Albums, Top Comedy Albums and Top Kid Audio joining that lineup this year.
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