Hello, I'm wondering if there's any archives for either China or India music charts in the 90s at least, I'm surprised by the lack of results as they're by far the 2 most populous countries

They're the most populous countries but don't let that get in the way of rotting Internet records.

 

Obviously it's in terms of what you're wanting to find. China has a very insular music market barely ever tapped by international artists (anecdotally you do hear SOME international music here but it's a small selection of the same ones and I'm obviously in the group more likely to seek it out). As such pretty much all of the chart records are going to be in Mandarin because most of the songs are Mandarin or Cantonese or another Chinese language. They're also very likely to be attached to radio stations or music services and on insular Chinese websites. For example, here's one modern chart: http://www.fm169.cn/minges.html . Lots of these current ones started with some internet tech like Shazam or Apple Music or just the internet in general, mostly in the 21st century though.

 

Which means I'm not sure if there were any charts going in the 90s. And if they were those are also very likely to be in Mandarin. I'm poking around on the Chinese Wikipedia and I can find award shows for popular singers (from back then!) but not chart listings.

 

India is perhaps a similar story but you're more likely to find results that you can parse if you don't read their script because some of their music does have a more international reach to the English sphere. No idea about archives though.

It's odd to see how UK, US and Europe charts can go way back but not as much for the 2 biggest countries in the world, same with Africa too, it's quite a shame the hits week by week weren't tracked

It's odd to see how UK, US and Europe charts can go way back but not as much for the 2 biggest countries in the world, same with Africa too, it's quite a shame the hits week by week weren't tracked

 

Because poor "third world" countries almost didn't have a legal music market. It's all about the piracy. Firstly illegal cassettes and CDs, after it illegal mp3 downloads.

It's not only China/India and Africa situation, but also about Russia, South American countries e.t.c.

That makes sense that wealth is a huge part of it, which is a shame