About This Blog & Matt F.

I’ve been a Country Music fan for over a decade and have a nerdy interest in math.  I first started listening to Lon Helton’s Top 30 countdown every Saturday morning and began to follow the chart.  When I got to college and access to the Internet, I found out more information about the history of the charts and how they work.  Eventually, I created a Top 40 chart because I kept wondering why songs that I loved were not peaking as high as I thought they would while other songs got higher than I thought.  

I used to run the chart based on my “feelings” that week.  I would move a song above another song if I thought it deserved it.  All the time I would do this, I was wondering if there was some way I could do this with some math.  Eventually, after revisiting those thoughts over and over, I finally decided to start (nearly 9 years after starting).  After trying some different formulas, I finally settled on one to start using.  Since then, I’ve made some tweaks to it and now have it at a level that I feel reflects my impression of the song as well as how radio is playing it. 

I was always influenced a little bit by how a song was doing on the charts.  I use the Billboard and Mediabase charts in my formula and I have a scale that I use for the current impression of a song.

For about 10 years, I called my chart My Top 40 (it became a Top 60 in 2008).  Recently, I decided to rename my chart the CML Chart and begin to share it here on this blog.  If you want more details on the chart and the formula I use, please visit The CML Chart Top 60 page.

Now, I’ve gotten into blogging about Country Music, bringing my perspective to the blogging community.  I feel I have a pretty good grasp on what stations are going to play and how much they’ll play a song.  Each week I will do single reviews and predict where I think the songs will end up on the charts.

Each week when I upload my chart online , I am going to make a blog entry.  In that entry I will tell you what songs make their Top 60 debuts.  Sometime during the week, I will post my reviews on those Top 60 debuts.

In January 2009, I started making the CML Chart interactive by allowing readers to vote for what songs they want to move up to the next level of Star Scores.  Now, the readers vote on the Star Score, allowing songs to gain another star and therefore climbing higher on the CML Chart.  This makes the chart a little more fun for me because its a little more unpredictable.  I will post the results of these early on Sunday mornings and will also create new polls for the next week then.

I hope you enjoy my blog and come back every week to check it out.  Feel free to comment on anything.  I allow anyone to post and will only not approve posts that are offensive to others, uses insensitive language, if it has no relevance to the blog entry, or if I made a change to the page or blog because of that comment.  Thanks!