Latest Site News

[Robbie]

I thought I'd post this thread at BuzzJack, not so much to gauge whether there would be much interest on charts from the 1980s but to provide a nice festive look at the Christmas charts of the 1980s!

If anyone here also posts at Haven and UKMIx you'll probably know that I've been posting the BMRB and Gallup charts of the 1980s, along with the panel sales information that the two chart compilers included with their sales reports. BMRB were the British Market Research Bureau, a market research agency which had been awarded the contract to compile the UK music industry charts in 1969. The organisation compiled the charts until the end of 1982 and were succeeded by Gallup, another polling company who compiled the charts until February 1994. The contarct then passed to Millward Brown (now Kantar) who continue to compile the charts to this day.

A couple of years ago I started to post the weekly Gallup charts from 1983 onwards and so far have reached the end of 1989. In addition I have recently been posting the BMRB charts from 1980 to 1982. Unlike the Gallup charts, which have been the weekly full top 200 charts - along with sales - the BMRB charts have been the monthly, not weekly, top 200 charts. I'm currently up to August 1982 with those charts. The chart information has kindly been provided to me by ukmix poster kobyhadrian. Thanks also go to BuzzJack poster kingofskiffle for collating this information and making it available for me to post.

kobyhadrian has very kindly also provided me with the Christmas week charts from 1980 to 1982. I had already posted the Christmas charts from 1983 to 1989 in their respective yearly thread. As we are approaching Christmas I thought it would be a good chance to pull them all together into the one thread.

A word on how these sales were put together. Unlike now, where nearly all sales are captured by Kantar, back in the 1980s it was a lot different. The charts compiled by BMRB were compiled from sales diaries which were sent to dealers each week to complete. When a customer bought a record the catalogue number of the record would be noted in the sales diary. At the end of each week, on a saturday evening, these diaries were posted back to BMRB who would then collate all the sales information from the diaries. It was quite a labour intensive job as all catalogue numbers had to be entered manually into the computer. This was done on a Monday with a chart being produced on a Tuesday morning. Radio 1 would then announce the new chart on a Tuesday at 12.45pm.

When Gallup took over chart compilation duties, they modernised the sales collection process. Instead of catalogue numbers being written in a diary, the record shop staff would type the number into a "dataport" machine. The information would then be sent electronically to Gallup HQ. Gradually datports were phased out and replaced by barcode readers and these in turn would be replaced by Electronic Point Of sale equipment that we have today.

One drawback of the data collection system under BMRB and gallup is that it was impossible to colect sales from every record store in the UK. The data collection process was too slow and expensive. Collecting sales data from every store that sold records was a pipe dream. Instead both BMRB and Gallup would limit how many stores each organisation used when conpiling the charts. By the time BMRB stopped compiling the charts this was only 750 stores. For Gallup, it about 2,000 stores by 1994. However, the purpose of the chart was to capture and reflect sales in the UK as a whole. In simple terms this was done by BMRB and Gallup using market research techniques to attempt to capture the make up of all UK sales in a much smaller universe of shops. Instead of sampling 4,000+ shops, both organisations attempted to capture national trends by using a smaller amount of shops and then reflecting sales in what were called "panel sales figures". These were sales in a set number of shops each week. When the charts were first compiled by BMRB in 1969 this set number of shops was 250. It was a hypothetical amount of shops but sales in those 250 shops were meant to reflect sales in the UK as a whole. While it wasn't possible to calculate actual UK sales, it was possible to calculate estimated market sales by using the panel sales figures that BMRB and Gallup compiled each week. Gallup estimated that its panel sales figures reflected sales in one seventeenth of all shops in the UK. To get an estimated market sales figure using Gallup panel sales, it suggested multiplying its weekly panel sales figures by 17. So, for example, a panel sale of 10,000 would produce an estimated market sale of 170,000. BMRB were less consistent in the figure that could be used to estimate market sales. In 1976, a BMRB special exercise to check the validity of its panel sales suggested that a 17 multiplier figure was about correct. However, from the late 1970s this figure decreases as more shops began to provide sales figures. In 1980 it appears the multiplier figure should be about 12.5. In 1981 it drops to 12 and in 1982 it seems to be about 11.5. As soon as gallup took over, using a different way of calculating its own panel sales, the figure rose back to 17.

The above isn't easy to explain and while I hope it provides a backdrop to how I've calculated estimated market sales for each chart, I wouldn't worry too much about how the panel sales figures were arrived at. For 1983 to 1989 they fall in with the way the industry estimated sales figures. For 1980 to 1982 they are my own take on what the estimated market sales should be.

Without any delay, I'll post the 27 December 1980 chart. The 26 December 1981 chart will appear tomorrow and then the charts will appear twice a day with the 30 December 1989 chart being posted on Friday afternoon or evening. if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. In the meantime, get reading and enjoy these charts!

This post has been edited by Robbie: 18th December 2023, 08:42 AM