Since when have the BRAVO music charts existed?
The first hit list in BRAVO appeared in issue 11 on November 4, 1956. The "BRAVO Musicbox" (subtitle "Schlagerfavoriten") included ten positions. The first top performer was the Austrian-born, Hamburg-based Freddy Quinn (*1931) with the song "Heimweh". Freddy Quinn also took second place with the song "Rosalie".
After that, the BRAVO reader list appeared almost regularly in every issue. There were a few interruptions between 1956 and 1959, as BRAVO was of the opinion that printing it was not necessary due to the small number of changes. The list was only printed if there were significant changes in the rankings. In later years, no hit parade was published when the annual balance sheet was listed instead.
In the course of its 58 years of publication, the BRAVO reader hit parade has undergone several facelifts. At the start it was only about ten centimeters high with just as many positions and was designed like a real jukebox , but from mid-1965 it appeared as a full page and showed 20 positions. In later years as many as 40 or 50 songs were listed. In order to have enough space for selected international placements and to sometimes also show the German sales and/or video charts, BRAVO occasionally printed the hit placements on a double page.
In the early years, the order of the hits was determined by the BRAVO editors. They looked at various other music parades, compared sales figures and international listings and then, at some point and somehow, came to a result. In the mid-1960s - or so BRAVO writes - 3,000 voting cards were sent out to subscribers every week and the corresponding positions were determined from the responses. Later - thanks to the Internet - they switched to online voting.
A total of 6,642 hits made it into the BRAVO reader listings , of which around ten percent - 657 songs - reached the top spot. The most successful song in the 58 years was " If You Go Away " by the New Kids On The Block, which was listed for 109 weeks between 1992 and 1994. But more on that elsewhere.
In 2013, the BRAVO reader hit list was discontinued, although it had always been a barometer of the currently popular hits and artists.