As anyone who cares already knows, today is the day Billboard changes the rules for its album charts and allows releases older than 18 months to appear on the Top 200. Considering the season, it’s no surprise that a large number of those older LPs are Christmas records. There seem to be some problems with the historical numbers, though. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is correctly shown with a peak position of 1. Oddly enough, though, The Beatle’s remasters, all of which also went to number one in their original release, show totally different peak postions. The White Album, for instance, shows a peak position of 152, it’s current position on the chart, despite being number 1 for nine weeks in 1968. The listing for Abbey Road is even more confusing. It was number 1 for 11 weeks, but Billboard shows its peak as 69, a number that makes no sense since its current position is 118 and it wasn’t on the chart last week. The remaster also made top ten on the old Comprehensive chart, so they can’t be referring to that, either. Perhaps not coincidentally, however, 69 does match up with the year of Abbey Road’s original release. It’s enough to make you wonder if they’re still doing these things by hand.
Update (11/30/09): The numbers are correct in the print edition, but are still wrong in both online versions of the chart. Guess nobody proofs the web sites.
