Hot Country Songs

Hot Country Songs is a chart published weekly by Billboard magazine in the United States.

This 50-position chart lists the most popular country music songs, calculated weekly by collecting airplay data from Nielsen BDS along with digital sales and streaming.

The current number-one song, as of the chart dated for February 20, 2016, is "Die a Happy Man" by Thomas Rhett.

History

Billboard began compiling the popularity of country songs with its January 8, 1944 issue. Only the genre's most popular jukebox selections were tabulated, with the chart titled "Most Played Juke Box Folk Records". The chart length was not standardized; a given week had anywhere from two to eight positions.

For approximately ten years, from 1948–1958, Billboard used three charts to measure the popularity of a given song. In addition to the jukebox chart, these charts included:

Hot Country

Hot Country is a 24-hour music format produced by Westwood One. Its playlist is composed of country music released from the late 1990s to the present. Core artists include Luke Bryan, Lady Antebellum, Blake Shelton, Zac Brown Band, Keith Urban and Taylor Swift among others.

Its competitors were "Country Today" by Waitt, CD Country, True 24-Hour Country, and U.S. Country by Jones; however those assets were absorbed by Triton Media Group, leaving ABC Radio's Today's Best Country and Real Country the only competitors. CD Country was consolidated into this satellite feed as of early 2009. Country Today is now a locally customized version of sister network Mainstream Country.

Westwood One has rebranded this network as Hot Country Today for a short time as part of Dial Global's revamped satellite format line-up, but then reverted to its previous name.

Westwood One offers this format only in a Total version, not in a Local version.

External links

Template:Dial-global

The Story So Far (band)

The Story So Far is an American pop punk band from Walnut Creek, California, formed in 2007.

History

Formation and early releases (2007–10)

The Story So Far formed in Walnut Creek, California in 2007. The band consisted of Parker Cannon on vocals, Kevin Geyer and Kevin Ambrose on guitar, Ryan Torf on drums, and Kelen Capener on bass. On December 22, the band released the 5 Songs EP. Ambrose parted ways with the band when he went to college in 2008 and he was replaced by William Levy. In March 2010 it was announced the band had signed to Pure Noise. Two months later the band released an EP, While You Were Sleeping (2010). In November, the band released a split with Maker.

Under Soil and Dirt, What You Don't See and Songs Of EP (2011–14)

Barrett Records released a split of The Story So Far and Morgan Foster in May 2011. Pure Noise released the band's debut album Under Soil and Dirt in June. On March 26, 2013, they released their second studio album, What You Don't See, which debuted at number 46 on the Billboard 200 chart in the U.S. They have also released a split with Stick to Your Guns on June 18. The band was featured on the cover of Alternative Press' March 2013 issue "100 Bands You Need to Know." The band played the entire Warped Tour 2014 on the main stage.

Country

A country is a region that is identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated people with distinct political characteristics. Regardless of the physical geography, in the modern internationally accepted legal definition as defined by the League of Nations in 1937 and reaffirmed by the United Nations in 1945, a resident of a country is subject to the independent exercise of legal jurisdiction.

Sometimes the word countries is used to refer both to sovereign states and to other political entities, while other times it refers only to states. For example, the CIA World Factbook uses the word in its "Country name" field to refer to "a wide variety of dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, uninhabited islands, and other entities in addition to the traditional countries or independent states".^{[Note 1]}

Country music

Country music is a genre of American popular music that originated in the Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from the southeastern genre of American folk music and Western music. Blues modes have been used extensively throughout its recorded history. Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjos, electric and acoustic guitars, dobros and fiddles as well as harmonicas. The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music; it came to encompass Western music, which evolved parallel to hillbilly music from similar roots, in the mid-20th century. The term country music is used today to describe many styles and subgenres. The origins of country music are the folk music of mostly white, working-class Americans, who blended popular songs, Irish and Celtic fiddle tunes, traditional ballads, and cowboy songs, and various musical traditions from European immigrant communities. In 2009 country music was the most listened to rush hour radio genre during the evening commute, and second most popular in the morning commute in the United States.