Back in 2014 I decided to create Spotify playlists that could contain as many charting songs as I could locate on the platform. One playlist for each year since what is recognised as the official UK singles chart became a published thing.
This was not exactly an original idea and on Spotify you will see attempts by others to do similar, perhaps focusing on tracks peaking between 1 and 40 or 1 and 75 only, if not 1 to 100 (at least from the point where a Top 100 chart was published).
But over the years these playlists have taken fuller shape as more and more tracks became available and I’ve included AA sides and up to two tracks per ‘Extended Play’ (EP) single where I can. These playlists are painstakingly put together (even with such excellent playlist converters these days it’s still painful), initially using the data from the mighty Polyhex database and subsquently officialcharts.com plus a few other sources such as scans of the Hit Music newsletter, to result in interactive documents (or, yes, playlists) of almost every song that entered the UK chart as listed.
Few of the playlists are effectively complete but several now lack only a small percentage of eligible tracks. A few others are substantially more incomplete, particularly from the 2000s.
The hits from 1952 to 1954 are actually combined into one playlist as there were not so many from those first few years of the chart compared to those of just a few more years later when it was expanded to a Top 50.
From 1978 onwards hits peaking between 51 and 75 have been included and from 1983 hits peaking between 76 and 100 have been added where available.
The best way to get at these playlists now is on my dedicated page at ghostfood.uk/music/ukcharthits/ where I also try to demonstrate how complete the playlists are by numbers and a few stats (allowing for a little margin of error when it comes to what was definitely a double A-side or EP single) with them.
You can also search my somewhat makeshift database of UK chart hits (currently from 1952 to 2019) via statjam.uk/go/hits
Happy listening!