A few months after that, a friend at school showed me an ARIA chart he'd picked up at a local independent record store. I noticed that it also had the top 50 albums chart printed on the reverse. I knew I had to get my own copy, so went with my friend to the store a couple of days later. By then, the printed chart was actually a few weeks old, but the store still had about 50 or more copies sitting there (which were free to take).
Unfortunately, I threw a lot of my ARIA charts from that period out during a house move in the early 90's. Luckily, a blog posts scans of the ARIA top 50 singles chart from 25 years ago each week. Below is the first ARIA chart I ever picked up, linked from the Chartbeat blog:
It took some years to realise, but the 'Breakers' section of the chart contained the 5 highest-charting songs outside of the top 50 that had (usually) not entered the top 50 yet, in order of their chart position. This information from 26th June 1988 (when ARIA stopped using the Australian Music Report chart and produced the chart in-house) until the end of December 1989 is particularly interesting for us Australian chart trainspotters, as the full top 100 from this period has not been publicly available to date.
It wasn't until 1992, however, that I started collecting the printed ARIA charts religiously, primarily for the albums chart, as I could get the top 60 (ten better than the printed ARIA chart) from Rage... well, until they stopped airing the top 60 in March 1994 (and a 3 month stint in 1991 where it reverted to the top 50).
Here's a scan from one of my chart books, where I'd cut and paste the albums chart (sans Breakers).
I changed the date on the albums chart (a day earlier) to match the Saturday that Rage aired the top 60. I began typing out the singles chart for my chart books later that year.
ARIA stopped producing the printed top 50 chart in October 1998 from memory, but by that point I'd largely lost interest in following the charts anyway... except the lower half of the top 100 (I've always generally preferred flops), which I was then receiving via an email list from a guy called Sarch. Although the printed charts featured 'for detailed chart information, send $100 to...' in small print near the bottom from 1990, I'd never been curious enough (or had the disposable pocket money at the time) to part with $100 for the 'detailed information'. Had I known that this was for an annual subscription to the full top 100 singles and albums charts (the ARIA report), I would have gladly parted with the dosh.
Cue forward to the mid 00's when I discovered that the local State Library held copies of the ARIA report (well, dating back to 1994 anyway). I made two separate trips to spend a whole afternoon photocopying their archives (well, only the top 100 singles & albums charts, plus the Chartifacts column) up until 1999. But there were so many singles I liked that missed the top 50/60, I had to know whether they at least scraped the top 100, so it was definitely worth it.
