VISUALIZING THE SONG RATINGS
Even after reading through my explanation (methodology)for the song ratings in TeenBeat Mayhem, many people still assume that a "5" rated song is considered just "average". Hardly.
TeenBeat Mayhem included what I called at that time (2012) a Garage-O-Meter pictorial. While some readers may not have the book, or if they do, are far too lazy to refer to the visual chart on pages 52-53, I've concocted an analogy to clarify just how the song ratings size up overall.
I am a 50 plus years student of the big three music industry periodicals: Billboard, Cashbox and Record World. Anyone familiar with popular music from the 1960s & 1970s era knows that a song from the Top 40 portion of the weekly "Top 100" [Hot 100 in Billboard"] is often cited as a "hit" single, whereas songs that hung around the lower region of the chart, or never entered the Top 100 (bubbled under, as Billboard phrased it) are considered non-hits - stiffs according to radio programmers, since they did not achieve a high percentage of airplay and or sales on a nationwide level, even if they were extremely popular solely within a locale at the time the 45rpm single was released.
The staggering amount of 45 rpm singles released by major, independent and vanity/custom labels each week during the mid to late 1960s (several thousand) guaranteed the odds of hitting even one of the trade mag charts extremely difficult, if not impossible. It helped immensely if the group/performer previously scored one hit single; their subsequent releases generally favored reaching the national charts as compared to a 45 by an unproven act. However, once a single debuted on the weekly chart, the higher it advanced (ascending numeric position movement week by week) the tougher it became to keep advancing upward. As a result, an extremely small percentage of songs (45s) from those past decades are now identified as "the big hits" (Top 10 or higher on the chart), perpetually lauded by retro analysts, radio programmers and pop music fans who did not live through the era. Their mindset believes that a "stiff" (song that failed to reach the Top 40) is not a worthwhile song, since 'big hits are the only songs that seem to matter to the public at large.
Well, we who love, study, and nit-pick among our favorite 60's garage rock 'n' roll songs are nowhere near as narrow-minded and short sighted when it comes to generalized analysis. Chart or non-chart, hit or non hit is irrelevant when judging songs categorized as '60's garage. The rating derives the musical worthiness - the sound emanating from the record groove or tape playback, not the chart performance, or lack thereof. We'll now call this the "musical impact factor". My breakdown correlation of the TeenBeat Mayhem numeric song rating to the weekly trade mag chart region/ position should alleviate confusion and the thought as to just what each decimal rating is truly worth.
TBM Decimal Rating = Industry Trade Chart Position Equivalent
10 = #1 peak for TWO or more consecutive weeks
9 = #1 peak for one week
8 = #2 peak
7 = #3 to #5 peak
6 = #6 to #10 peak
5 = #11 to #20 peak
4 = #21 to #40 peak
3 = #41 to #70 peak
2 = #71 to #90 peak
1 = #91 to #100 peak
Now, readers can grasp just how "great" a TBM 10 rated song is; a TBM 9 is a near equal. Moving downward, a TBM 5 is considered a solid, well above average rated song, equating to a national Top 20 hit single. These are songs that true collectors and fans would want to own and listen to repeatedly.
A TBM 4 is still perceived as being above average pending the higher decimal result, however, that window closes the lower it drops in decimal rating. To illustrate, there are more "4" rated songs (5,689) out of the entire 18,450+ that have been rated in the pdf file. The current exact mathematical average rating yields 4.222. In time, as more unrated songs are tallied, this average rating will drop below 4.222.
When you see a TBM rating of 3.x, those songs are the ones that should be judged as "average" when compared to the overall total number of listed songs in the A to Z pdf file. I personally like and enjoy listening to most of these 3 rated tracks; another 60s garage music fan may not, or will flippantly dismiss these low rated tracks as "no good". A TBM 2 rating even more so. TBM 1 rated tunes sink to the "Bottom Of The Barrell; a musically borderline song that very few might like - well, at least those of us with a mindset for the sounds of 1960s garage rock 'n' roll.