Billboard Stage & Screen Charts Soundtracks and musical cast albums have been a part of Billboard’s main album charts dating to March 24, 1956, when Billboard began publishing an all-encompassing albums chart on a consistent weekly basis. That week, the then-named Best Selling Pop Albums chart ranked the week’s top 10 biggest albums — and four of them were film soundtracks (Oklahoma!, Carousel, The Benny Goodman Story and The Man With the Golden Arm). In the decades since, numerous soundtracks and cast albums have topped the chart, today known as the Billboard 200. In 2001, Billboard launched the weekly Soundtracks chart, giving soundtrack projects their own home, while the Cast Albums chart bowed in 2006. Titles eligible for the Soundtracks chart typically include conventional film and TV soundtracks such as High School Musical, Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain and Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born. Releases eligible for Cast Albums are cast recordings from musical stage shows, including the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton: An American Musical, the original London cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera and the original Broadway cast recording of Wicked.