Latest Site News

[Gambo]

It is a phenomenal effort just in the copying, collating, typing and posting these original chart Gallup/BMRB reports, and it should be clear for those interested in these over on UKMix but don't know the history that it couldn't have happened without three key chartographers of our time - Robbie himself who does the posting, KingofSkiffle who does the collation and database elements, and most importantly Kobyhadrian, who originally obtained all the reports from the BPI and spent Lord-knows how many man hours typing them up into a presentable form! They have between them summoned up a very thorough and as accurate as is available database of panel sales activity across almost two decades' worth of singles chart history, and the quality and consistency of the results now being steadily made accessible to us all can't be underestimated. I'm keen that fellow chart travellers on BuzzJack are aware of this if ever they investigate these chart reports and make use of them.

Yes, it still leaves us bereft of such detailed data for the three most recent decades since Millward Brown have been at the helm of official chart compilation, and of course the pre-1976 era when popular music as we know it truly established itself. But we've got to be grateful for what we get, and tolerate the reality that there'll almost certainly always be significant gaps where there is far less data, or none at all, accessible to us. Anything like exact weekly or monthly panel sales reports from the latter period probably no longer exist and the further one goes back, the less accurate any data becomes; as to the former, there will be much accurate and useful sales information stored, but unless we ever have the luxury of someone posting Millward Brown original reports, or somebody gets rare (and ludicrously expensive!) access to the OCC's database, one has to doubt that those decades will ever be covered in the same depth chart-wise as the 1976-'94 canon. So we're lucky even to now have that.