Looking over the data for the Billboard top 100 chart for the year 2000, we initially see some concerns. First, is that the genre's seem to be very broad. For example, there are many songs with categories that don't seem to match up for their appropriate sound. One glaring example is Sisqo being labeled 'Rock'.

Secondly, there are an incredible number of NaNs in the data, including all columns after the 66th week. So we can quickly take that away, and deduce that no song from the year 2000 made it for longer than 66 weeks on the Billboard top 100 chart. However, a year is 52 weeks, so it's safe to assume that some songs came into 2000 already on the chart, and possibly remained on for the entire duration of the year.

Looking at a quick graph, we can see how many songs each artist had on the top 100. There are many artists that had more than one song, showing that many artists had much more success than a 'one hit wonder'.

number of tracks (10 = 1 track for some reason)

By far, most artists only had 1 track make it that year, but a few seemed to transcend the trend and produce multiple hits that year. Changing it to get a representation of which genre's are most represented, we can see that:

Rock, Country, and Rap all but dominated the charts that year. Other genres have some slight representation, but by and large, it fell into one of those three. Genre seems to be arbitrarily set, as I could not find any documentation as to how they go about it. For me, some of the songs seem to be classified indirectly, or automatically placed into a category based off something specific, like "this song has a drum and guitar set."

If we look genre, and compare week 1 to week 25, we can see that week 1 has a much more diverse representation of genres. Much smaller categories, like Gospel, Jazz, and Reggae all have at least 1 song. This can probably be attributed to something of "going viral" back then. Where a song finds incredible popularity, but it is very short lived. Once the song fades out of the public eye and popular media, it is all but forgotten about.

As you can see, by the 25th week, only a couple of the genres remain, with Rock taking the lion's share. A lot of the genres cater to a specific sound, such as Country or Latin. Rock is so broadly perceived, so diversely interpreted, that almost anyone can find a song they enjoy in the Rock category.

The graph above shows the songs popularity from week 25 to week 27. The shorter the bar, the higher the ranking on the Billboard 100. Once a song made it this far, it tended to not change too quickly because it had sustaining popularity that is simply fading over time as new songs come into the picture.

The picture below represents the initial week 1 ranking for an artist onto the Billboard 100. The closer to the bottom, the higher the ranking. There is an average line going through it, showing that the average spot starts out at about 79 or 80 on the Billboard 100.

Comparing that with week 27 on the chart:

Much harder to tell, but the average is about 27. This tells us some stuff about it. First, that for a song to stay on the Top 100, it has to be growing in popularity. It isn't enough to simply stagnate and level off at a comfortable spot. People need to be actively enjoying it and new people need to be finding it in order to keep it relevant. Second, once a song reaches high popularity, it drops off the chart much slower than songs that can never make it far past the initial average.

Some other questions I had that I'd like to answer eventually:

• If a song hit number 1, how long, on average, did it tend to stay there?
• Would any song stay on the chart at no higher than a certain number (different thresholds, such as the average) for a number of weeks?
• How often would genres outside the top 3 (Rock, Country, Rap) break into the top 20?
• How did the Billboard top 100 team include Sisqo in the Rock category?