Joel Whitburn's Album Cuts - 1955-2001

Rating:
Summary: A handy reference for chart hounds like myself
Review: This book, the companion to "Top Pop Albums 1955-2001", is a great resource for people into popular music chart data. In case the book's description isn't clear, this is the kind of thing you can do with this book:

Do you want to make a compilation of every artist who recorded "Yesterday" on an album that charted on Billboard's pop album chart? This book lists, by song title, the artist name and year that the artist released an album with that song on it. Then you can look in the "Top Pop Albums" book to find out the name of the album the song was on.

My two criticisms of this book are that (a) it lumps recordings of different songs with the same song title together and (b) the cover doesn't match the companion book. As to the latter, since this book is really best thought of as part of a set, it would make sense to me to have their bindings appear similar. As to the former, if the reader has extensive knowledge of music he/she will probably be able to recognize song title entries that actually refer to more than one song; others may get confused and think that, for example, Kool and the Gang covered the Association's "Cherish."

Rating:
Summary: A handy reference for chart hounds like myself
Review: This book, the companion to "Top Pop Albums 1955-2001", is a great resource for people into popular music chart data. In case the book's description isn't clear, this is the kind of thing you can do with this book:

Do you want to make a compilation of every artist who recorded "Yesterday" on an album that charted on Billboard's pop album chart? This book lists, by song title, the artist name and year that the artist released an album with that song on it. Then you can look in the "Top Pop Albums" book to find out the name of the album the song was on.

My two criticisms of this book are that (a) it lumps recordings of different songs with the same song title together and (b) the cover doesn't match the companion book. As to the latter, since this book is really best thought of as part of a set, it would make sense to me to have their bindings appear similar. As to the former, if the reader has extensive knowledge of music he/she will probably be able to recognize song title entries that actually refer to more than one song; others may get confused and think that, for example, Kool and the Gang covered the Association's "Cherish."