The commercialisation of music has spawned many attempts to compare individual pieces of music and to rate them on some kind of scale, using record sales and airplay as the key indicators of success, popularity, and quality.
The relationship between the music industry and the rating charts , developed by enterprises such as Billboard in the U.S. and Melody Maker in the U.K. is not as simple as it might seem. The charts certainly reflect record-buying habits and the...