Since its inception in the late 1950s, the
Billboard Hot 100 chart had been complied using a combination of retail sales and radio airplay data. However, in the October 20, 1984 issue of
Billboard magazine, it was announced that separate charts for retail sales and airplay would also be published. They were published on the same page of the magazine and had a number to show where each song was on the main
Billboard Hot 100 chart. In the May 25, 1991, issue of
Billboard, it was announced that for 30 years up until then, retail sales data had been provided to them by record stores, either by telephone or by messaging service, but that the magazine was looking into using
barcode scanning to provide more accurate data. In the June 8, 1991, issue of the magazine, there had been speculation over the future of retail singles, but it had been decided that the
Billboard charts being based on a combination of sales and airplay, made it a necessity to release retail singles. In this issue of the magazine, the chart began being named the POS Singles Sales chart which meant "point-of-sales". There was an overlap from when the new POS chart started being published in June, 1991, but the old retail chart was still being used as the component chart of the Hot 100, On August 31, 1996,
Billboard reported that it had been experimenting with reducing the ratio of retail sales used to compile the main
Billboard Hot 100 chart from 40% to 20% due to the changing market. However, on March 1, 1997,
Billboard announced that a song would not be able to chart on the main
Billboard Hot 100 unless it had charted on the Hot 100 Singles Sales chart first. On September 19, 1998,
Billboard reported that the Hot 100 chart had been based on a 60/40 ratio of airplay to retail sales but that this had become problematic. Then on December 5, 1998,
Billboard announced that because of the large number of singles that had been released to radio but not as retail singles, including from the genres of rock, pop, country, and R&B, that airplay only singles would be able to chart on the main
Billboard Hot 100 chart. The retail component of the chart was also reduced from 40% to 25%. By 2003, if a physical retail single had an equivalent digital release with the same track listing, and all tracks were downloaded, then this would count as a sale towards the Singles Sales chart, but if only one of the tracks was downloaded then it would count as a sale towards the
Hot Digital Tracks chart, and then later the
Hot Digital Songs chart. Keith Caufield of
Billboard gave the example of
Kate Nash's 2007 single "
Foundations" that made it to number 1 on the Singles Sales chart with 14,000 sold and that 4,000 of these were retail CD singles and 10,000 were download sales. For individual song downloads, "Foundations" sold 61,000, but this was still not enough to get it onto the Hot Digital Songs chart, showing the now slight importance of the Singles Sales chart. In the August 4, 2007, issue of the magazine, it was announced that with the introduction of
streaming being used to compile the Hot 100, that sales of retail singles would contribute towards less than 1% of how the chart is compiled. The Hot Singles Sales chart was last featured on the regular issue of
Billboard magazine on July 5, 2008, and had since become available only on
Billboard.biz, the online extension of the magazine. However, occasionally the chart was still published in the regular print version of the magazine to coincide with
Record Store Day. The chart was completely ended by
Billboard on November 25, 2017. ==Achievements and milestones==