Hit Songs by the Numbers & What They Reveal About Us Stats + Stories Episode 379

The Billboard Hot 100 has been ranking the week's most popular music since 1958. The first song to top the chart was Ricky Nelson's Poor Little Fool. The most recent song to do so is Taylor Swift's The Fate of Ophelia. A lot has changed in the music industry between those two songs, not only in the types of songs that top the charts, but also in how they're promoted and how they're determined. A new book explores the statistics behind the Hot 100, and it's the focus of this episode of Stats + Stories with guest Chris Dalla Riva. Chris Dalla Riva is an analyst for the music streaming service Audiomack by day while spending his nights writing and recording music and writing about music for his newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher.

You can listen to Hit Songs by the Numbers & What They Reveal About Us Stats + Stories Episode 379 online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Hit Songs by the Numbers & What They Reveal About Us Stats + Stories Episode 379 is an episode from Stats + Stories by Stats + Stories.

This episode is 00:31:17 long.

This episode was published on Jan 8, 2026.

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