Billboard Explains: The Year-End Charts

2023 is coming to a close, and what better way to celebrate the year than with Billboard‘s year-end charts? But what are the year-end charts? When did they start and how are they created? Billboard sits down with Managing Director of Charts Keith Caulfield to explain how we create these year-end tallies.

Alyssa Caverley:
This is Billboard Explains the Year-End Charts. Billboard first launched the annual year-end charts back in the 1940s, and they have been published every year since. What exactly are these charts? They represent aggregated metrics for each artist, title, label and music contributor on the weekly charts dated Nov. 19, 2022, to Oct. 21, 2023.

Keith Caulfield:
That’s a complicated way of saying if you look at our charts and add them all together, at the end of the year, we spit out who the top artists, songs and albums are.

Alyssa Caverley:
The charts have evolved in different ways throughout the decades thanks to technological advancements, including how the year-end charts are determined. Billboard‘s managing director of charts and data operations Keith Caulfield explains.

Keith Caulfield:
The simple answer as best as I can tell you is you take all of the combined performance for all of the songs artists albums on a particular chart throughout that chart here, add them all together, and then you get a bunch of numbers. And that, generally speaking, is what the year-end version of that chart would look like.

Watch the full video above!