I did not know that about “American Pie”.

No pattern seems to really emerge… #1 songs are very slightly longer on average than they were in the 50’s, but not quite as long as they were in the 80’s and 90’s? The graph of maximums is crazy.

There hasn’t been a #1 song under 2 minutes long since the sixties? That’s crazy.

That’s a lovely, lovely graph – I’ve been staring at it for several minutes. There’s something in there for everyone no matter what shade of heartfelt opinion on the state of music they happen to have. I kind of want to see the quartiles but aesthetically that wouldn’t work.

I once, unwisely, let a couple of people talk me into getting up to sing karaoke with them and even more unwisely allowed them to choose American Pie. It went on and on and on and on and on. We were *awful*.

Love this chart. The 1972 spike is obviously Don McLean, but who’s responsible for 1979? I thought maybe the Summer/Streisand duet, but Wikipedia says the seven-inch mix was under five minutes.

Survey says it’s Anita Ward’s Ring My Bell.

Don McLean is singlehandedly responsible for a fairly high proportion (relatively speaking) of awful Karaoke performances — I have myself contributed to this statistic. Not sure what drives people to pick that song but it seems to be a popular choice for people to perfom poorly.

This series is a great thing. Is there a way to get all the charts on one page? The “MUSIC” link only gets three of them, then one must click an “earlier entries” link to see more. And likely “MUSIC” will have more posts added to it after this particular series is complete.

É demais esse filme