Where Did The Top 100 Come From?

This turns out to be a rhetorical question on the level of "why is the sky blue" and "how much product was in Mark Goodman's hair".  But we can attempt to attack the question logically.  If we start with the basic premise that #1 is supposed to be the best, and #100 is...well, not the worst, because many videos don't even make the list.  But what determines where a video is ranked?  Monkeys picking numbers out of a hat?  The process can be baffling, as I've previously ranted about in my 1985 countdown blog.

However, we are not walking blindly in the jungle.  Evidence exists which implies that the year-end countdown was at least partially based on MTV's weekly top 20 video countdown, which aired on Friday nights.  Generally speaking, the more successful a video's overall performance on the weekly countdown (in both peak position and longevity), the higher the video will rank in the year-end countdown.  With some notable exceptions as we will see.

It is difficult to assess whether the ranking of a particular video is fair, because official records of the weekly top 20 video countdowns do not exist.  Until some ex-MTV intern from back in the day cleans out their garage and publishes the original lists, we're out of luck.  Fortunately, there are dedicated archivists publishing amazing MTV chart research on the interwebs.

The music website UK Mix hosts a chat forum dedicated to the MTV Top 20 Video Countdown.  Within this forum exists some of the only surviving evidence of MTV Top 20 chart performance.  Some chart results are taken from old Rolling Stone magazines, and some from the detailed handwritten notes of scholarly MTV enthusiasts.  Some of the results shared are estimates, but considering the attention to detail, I have come to trust the results more often than not.

I owe a debt of gratitude to this forum, particularly a participant who goes by the name of "mrpenpen", who I believe to be the world's leading authority on the week to week placement of videos in the MTV Top 20 countdown during the mid-'80s.  It would have been impossible to analyze the integrity of the year-end Top 100 countdown without this resource.  Thank you all at UK Mix, your painstaking efforts have not been in vain.