“Number One With A Bullet”, explained

I was snooping around for the hidden meaning of the term “number one with a bullet”. Its meaning could not only be the movie with the same name. And, of course there was more to the story.

I’m glad you asked, flow. As a matter of fact, the term “number one with a bullet” originated with Billboard Magazine’s (110 years!) charting system. When a song or album is number one, it has the most sales or spins out of anything else. when an item on a Billboard chart has a bullet by it, it means that those sales or spins are climbing higher than they were the week before. So a “number one with a bullet” is a song/album that not only is number one, but still continues to climb in terms of sales/spins. So it’s a number one with a vengeance.

Source

Here is an example of the chart in 1964:

(Note, no bullet illustration in this one.)

Published by Olle Jonsson

Human. Wears glasses and often a smile.