I have decided to embark on a journey of discovery to determine my Peak Music year, which you may remember me discussing in an earlier post, “What Does My Taste In Music Say About Me?” Initially I was at a loss as to how this could be accomplished, and after some thought I decided that there would be no truly scientific way to study this, that there would be a large measure of subjectivity involved.  Since we’re talking about my taste in music, which is really just my opinion, I figured subjectivity would be OK.  In some of my Music Friday posts where I give background on the songs I’ve chosen, I often reference where the song placed on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart in a certain year.  With that in mind I decided the measurement of a song’s popularity as measured by the BillBoard Hot 100 chart could form a basis of information to determine what year is my “Peak Music” year.  Fortunately all the Billboard charts going back to 1958 are archived online at the Billboard Magazine website.  1958 is plenty far enough for my purposes, since I was only born in 1956 and have decided arbitrarily that I would start my search at 1965 anyway.  Side note:  in addition to viewing the weekly charts, you can listen to the songs through Spotify.  If you don’t have a Spotify account you can set one up for free, you just need to provide your e-mail adress.

This is going to be a process.  Since I’ve decided that my peak music year is likely to fall between 1965 and 1975, I will research those years first.  If I am unsatisfied with the end result, I will expand the survey to earlier and later years.  Since the BillBoard Hot 100 chart is released weekly, there are 52 charts per given year, each chart with 100 songs on it.  Yikes!  I have decided, again arbitraily, to review only the #1 songs from each weekly chart and determine which artist or group had the most #1’s.  The artist or group with the most #1 songs in a given year I will deem the “most popular” of that year.  Then based on that I will decide which of those ten artists or groups are my favorite and that year they were the “most popular” will be my “Peak Music” year.  Make sense?  Probably not, but I’m going with it anyway.

Oh…and once I determine the winner for a given year, I will feature that artist’s #1 song (or songs) on that Music Friday.

So…the 1965 Billboard Hot 100.  Winner:  The Beatles with five #1’s – I Feel Fine, Eight Days a Week, Ticket to Ride, Help! and Yesterday.

Runners up were The Supremes with four #1’s.  The only other groups with multiple #1’s were The Rolling Stones and Herman’s Hermits with two apiece.

So Here are the Beatle’s #1 songs from 1965.  Since I just featured Eight Days a Week last Friday, follow this link for that song.  The others follow now.

Next week – 1966!  See ya!