Last week, Premiere Networks played the first half of American Top 40’s Top 100 of 1983. Now, it’s time for #50-#1. Even though I wasn’t listening to Casey any longer by this point, I still took the time to hear the year-end shows while I was in college. Here’s what I wrote down back then:
There’s much more sorting by peak position here than was present in 77–it’s my understanding that sometime in the 80s they changed the underlying formulas used to compute these year-enders. Most of the songs that “outperformed” their peak position (specifically, “The Look of Love,” “Allentown,” and “You and I”) in this survey tended to be from before April. It was in the 4/30/83 Hot 100 that a new “chart master” took over and a different methodology for computing the weekly surveys was employed.
The Music of My Life 