At first this seemed like a pretty straightforward thing to me. Copying Billboard's rankings verbatim is clearly not fair use (and their arrangement is certainly copyrightable, because their formulas are probably somewhat complex). Using little quotes like "This album reached #5 on the Billboard charts in 1983" is clearly fair use (very small part of their total content; does not impact their future profits in the slightest).
But there seems to be a lot in between, when I look at the actual articles. I can't tell what is verbatim and what is user-derived when I look at some of these pages (in particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Hot_100), though that might just be my ignorance of the subject matter. I don't know where the arrangement-of-an-arrangement line puts the copyright situation -- if we make a list of the top #1 Billboard albums of all time (something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_No._1_R%26B_hits_%28United_States%29) , is that sufficiently re-arranged to preclude their copyright? Or does the fact that our arrangement is clearly not based on any formulas or complicated decisions mean that we add absolutely nothing in terms of "creativity"?
FF