The Dance Club Songs chart is a weekly chart published exclusively by Billboard in the United States. It is a national survey of the songs which are the most popular in nightclubs across the country and is compiled from reports from a national sample of disc jockeys. It was launched as the Disco Action Top 30 chart on August 28, 1976, and became the first chart by Billboard to document the popularity of dance music. Since its inception, several artists have set various records and garnered multiple achievements. In January 2017, Billboard proclaimed Madonna as the most successful artist in the history of the chart, ranking her first in their list of the 100 top all time dance artists; she also holds the record for the most number-one songs, with 46.Katy Perry holds the record for having eighteen consecutive number-one songs, an unbroken streak; her third studio album, Teenage Dream (2010), also holds the record for being the only album in the history of the chart to produce at least seven number-one songs.
The first number-one song on the Dance Club Songs chart for the issue dated August 28, 1976, was "You Should Be Dancing" by the Bee Gees; it spent five weeks atop the chart and was the group's only number-one song. The current number-one song on the Dance Club Songs chart for the issue dated September 2, 2017, is "Only Want You" by Skylar Stecker.
Dance Club Songs has undergone several incarnations since its inception in 1974. Originally a top-ten list of tracks that garnered the largest audience response in New York City discothèques, the chart began on October 26, 1974 under the title Disco Action. The chart went on to feature playlists from various cities around the country from week to week. Billboard continued to run regional and city-specific charts throughout 1975 and 1976 until the issue dated August 28, 1976, when a thirty-position National Disco Action Top 30 premiered. This quickly expanded to forty positions, then in 1979 the chart expanded to sixty positions, then eighty, and eventually reached 100 positions from 1979 until 1981, when it was reduced to eighty again.