Waxy/Andy Baio posted the first installment in a three part series on The Whitburn Project. Baio will continue his fascinating analysis over the upcoming days.

Named after Joel Whitburn of Record Research, The Whitburn Project is a massive database of exhaustive details pertaining to every popular song released in the last 120 years. It’s discussed and distributed through Usenet.

To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.
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The Excel spreadsheets were created to help them verify their collections were complete, with new versions updated and re-uploaded to the newsgroups weekly. Later, other collectors found the spreadsheet and built tools on top of it, including a utility to rename files properly and locate missing songs.