With 100 Reaching for the Stars entries under my belt, it is time to break down where we’ve been, AT40 style.

It should be no shock that there have been more entries from 1984 than any other year, a healthy 18 posts from the greatest year in pop music history. I was mildly surprised that 1982 was second with 16. Not sure if that’s a function of more 1982 countdowns being rebroadcast than other years, or more 1982 songs grabbing my attention. Here’s a year-by-year breakdown:

1976 – 3
1977 – 2
1978 – 4
1979 – 3
1980 – 6
1981 – 7
1982 – 16
1983 – 12
1984 – 18
1985 – 10
1986 – 10
1987 – 3
1988 – 2
1989 – 3
2023 – 1

One of the biggest artists of 1984 led the way on the posts-per-act list. Again, not a surprise who is at the top.

Prince – 3
Elton John – 2*
Daryl Hall and John Oates – 2
Pat Benatar – 2
Sheena Easton – 2
Kansas – 2
Stevie Nicks – 2*

(Both Elton and Stevie have entires as duets with other artists that I give them full credit for.)

Another common element of American Top 40 was Casey Kasem sharing the geographic breakdown of charts in weeks when there was a lot of non-American representation. “This week there are a whopping 21 foreign acts on the chart!” Here are the locations where we can place pins on our virtual RFTS map.

United States – 67
United Kingdom – 20
Australia – 4
Canada – 4
Netherlands – 1

The remaining four were either multi-national groups or posts about special countdowns that had no single act as a focus.

I tried to tally the entries by genre, but that proved difficult. In retrospect, like 90% of what I’ve written about can be defined as Pop. How do you decide which Prince songs were Pop and which were Soul, for example? Same for several other Black artists. Where was the line between Pop and Rock? Adult contemporary vs. Pop? Disco/Dance vs. Soul? Impossible. So I scrapped that breakdown.

Beyond those numbers, nothing else really jumped out at me. My entries have gotten longer and more detailed, which shouldn’t be a surprise. They also take more time to write now than they did when I began this series. I think that has made them better. I hope that means they are more interesting to read for my fellow music geeks. If you’re not into deep music trivia dives, you probably think those early posts were better.

If you want to go back and review any of the first 100 posts in the series, here’s the link to my RFTS page.

If you had any worries that I was bringing the series to a close after making it to 100 post, never fear, I’m already working on volume 101. I also have several partial drafts waiting for when we get to the right part of the calendar. As Casey said every week, the countdown continues!