Billboard Dance Club Songs Charts (From 1974 to 2019)

The Dance Club Songs chart is a weekly chart published exclusively by Billboard in the United States. It is a national survey of the songs which are the most popular in nightclubs across the country and is compiled from reports from a national sample of disc jockeys.[1] It was launched as the Disco Action Top 30 chart on August 28, 1976, and became the first chart by Billboard to document the popularity of dance music.

Since its inception, several artists have set various records and garnered multiple achievements. In January 2017, Billboard proclaimed Madonna as the most successful artist in the history of the chart, ranking her first in their list of the 100 top all time dance artists and Janet Jackson being the second most successful dance club artist of all-time; Madonna also holds the record for the most number-one songs, with 48.

Katy Perry holds the record for having eighteen consecutive number-one songs. Perry’s third studio album, Teenage Dream (2010), became the first album in the history of the chart to produce at least seven number-one songs between 2010–12, a record it held solely until Rihanna’s eighth studio album Anti produced eight chart toppers through 2016-17. Rihanna is the only artist to have achieved five number-one songs in a calendar year.

The first number-one song on the Dance Club Songs chart for the issue dated August 28, 1976, was “You Should Be Dancing” by the Bee Gees; it spent five weeks atop the chart and was the group’s only number-one song. The current number-one song on the Dance Club Songs chart for the issue dated September 14, 2019, is “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free 2019” by Sting.

A Brief History

Dance Club Songs has un­der­gone sev­eral in­car­na­tions since its in­cep­tion in 1974. Orig­i­nally a top-ten list of tracks that gar­nered the largest au­di­ence re­sponse in New York City dis­cothèques, the chart began on Oc­to­ber 26, 1974 under the title Disco Action. The chart went on to fea­ture playlists from var­i­ous cities around the coun­try from week to week.

Bill­board con­tin­ued to run re­gional and city-spe­cific charts through­out 1975 and 1976 until the issue dated Au­gust 28, 1976, when a thirty-po­si­tion Na­tional Disco Ac­tion Top 30 pre­miered. This quickly ex­panded to forty po­si­tions, then in 1979 the chart ex­panded to sixty po­si­tions, then eighty, and even­tu­ally reached 100 po­si­tions from 1979 until 1981, when it was re­duced to eighty again.

Dur­ing the first half of the 1980s the chart main­tained eighty slots until March 16, 1985 when the Disco charts were splin­tered and re­named. Two charts ap­peared: Hot Dance/Disco, which ranked club play (fifty po­si­tions), and Hot Dance Music/Maxi-Sin­gles Sales, which ranked 12-inch sin­gle (or maxi-sin­gle) sales (also fifty po­si­tions, now re­duced to ten and avail­able through Billboard.​biz only).

Only Hot Dance Club Songs still ex­ists today. In 2003 Bill­board in­tro­duced the Hot Dance Airplay chart (now known as Dance/Mix Show Air­play), which is based solely on radio air­play of six dance music sta­tions and top 40 mix shows elec­tron­i­cally mon­i­tored by Nielsen Broad­cast Data Sys­tems.[10] These sta­tions are also a part of the elec­tron­i­cally mon­i­tored panel that en­com­passes the Hot 100.

On Jan­u­ary 26, 2013, Bill­board added a new chart, Dance/Elec­tronic Songs, which tracks the 50 most pop­u­lar Dance and Elec­tronic sin­gles and tracks based on dig­i­tal sin­gle sales, stream­ing, radio air­play, and club play as re­ported on the com­po­nent Dance/Elec­tronic Dig­i­tal Songs, Dance/Elec­tronic Stream­ing Songs, and Dance Club Songs charts. Radio air­play is not lim­ited to that counted on the Dance/Mix Show Air­play chart.

Although the disco chart began reporting popular songs in New York City nightclubs, Billboard soon expanded coverage to feature multiple charts each week which highlighted playlists in various cities such as San Francisco, San Diego, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, Detroit and Houston (among others).

During this time, Billboard rival publication Record World was the first to compile a dance chart which incorporated club play on a national level. Noted Billboard statistician Joel Whitburn has since “adopted” Record Worlds chart data from the weeks between March 29, 1975 and August 21, 1976 into Billboards club play history.

For the sake of continuity, Record Worlds national chart is incorporated into both Whitburn’s Dance/Disco publication (via his Record Research company) as well as the 1975 and 1976 number-ones lists. With the issue dated August 28, 1976, Billboard premiered its own national chart (National Disco Action Top 30) and their data is used from this date forward.

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