I don't think it was a lie it was something to do with rounding up or down so it sold 8 more copies in the sample but the extrapolation formula made them tie. However since they didn't track every sale back in 1990 we'll never know which single actually sold more copies.

 

Yes your right it did sell 8 copies more. Heres An article from Record Mirror from Sept 1990, explaining it in more detail.

 

"Controversy raged last week over the tussle for the Gallup Chart’s Number One spot between Steve Miller’s ‘The Joker’ and Record Mirror favourites Deee-Lite’s ‘Groove Is In The Heart’. The latter’s record company issued a press release last week attacking the fairness of the Gallup Chart for placing the Miller track at Number One, despite both records achieving the same “panel sales” – the first time it’s happened with the Number One spot. Here Alan Jones, Record Mirror’s chart statistician and a chart consultant with Gallup, explains the complexities of the situation from the chart compilers’ point of view, while on page 31 News Plus looks at the music industry’s response to the affair.

 

The reality of the situation is that according to Gallup’s best guess, the Steve Miller Band single actually sold eight copies more than Deee-Lite’s and only the way in which Gallup presents the information to suit record industry tradition conceals the fact.

 

The “panel sales” of 2595 mentioned by WEA in its press release are a distillation of a very complex mathematical logarithm. A panel sale represents about one in every 17 actual sales, even though Gallup actually monitor a good deal more. The notion of a panel sale exists because from when the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) started to compile the chart in 1969 to when Gallup took over in 1983, the panel of shops used to compile the chart was 250 strong. Gallup immediately set about strengthening the panel for the good reason that a larger panel makes hyping very expensive and difficult, and provides statistically significant samples from which they can (and do) extrapolate a mass of marketing information for record companies. The chart is only the tip of the iceberg.

 

Today more than 900 shops are equipped with the Epson machines into which they key, or more frequently ‘wand’ their sales by passing a light pen over a barcode. Gallup’s computer collects data from them all. The problem is that the record industry needs to see sales represented by a constant base of shops, so all the sales are distilled back down to a typical sample of 250 every week.

 

Gallup breaks the UK record market down into small “cells” to analyse its sales. If for the sake of argument, there are 104 medium sized independent shops in London and Gallup has Epson computers in 26 of them which register 59 sales for a record, the assumption is that the record would sell 236 copies in the 10 [spelling error, should read 104] shops as a whole. Similarly, if Gallup has established the fact that there are, say, 30 small Woolworths branches selling records in the South East, of which the 12 on the panel sell 18 copies of a record, they wouldn’t be far wrong in estimating that a total of 45 would be sold by the 30 Woolies together.

 

Sales from the shops on the Gallup panel are all “grossed up” in this way until the company has an estimate of the total number of sales for each of the 20,000 or so different titles on which it detects sales every week.

 

It could represent this information to the industry as an estimate of actual sales. For example, last week’s number three by Bombalurina sold an estimated 40,596 copies. The problem is, as I said before, that the industry knows where it is with its weighted average of 250 shops so everything has to be reduced to represent the wider picture in microcosm. Two hundred and fifty shops represent about a 17th of the actual UK total. All sales are therefore reduced to a 17th of their grossed up totals. Bombalurina thus ended up with 2388 panel sales.

 

‘The Joker’ and ‘Groove is In The Heart’ you will recall both had published panel sales of 2595. But these are “rounded” figures. The Gallup computer actually adjudged that ‘The Joker’ sold 44,118 copies and that ‘Groove is In The Heart’ sold 44,110 copies, which equate to panel sales of 2595.2 and 2594.7 respectively. So either way you look at it, ‘The Joker’ was Number One".

 

 

After the Steve Miller Band / Deee-Lite controversy the rules were changed (from January 1991 I think) to allow tied positions to occur. However, they were only considered to be tied if the panel sales were the same to one decimal place, so with the Steve Miller Band having 2595.2 panel sales and Deee-Lite having 2594.7 they would not have tied under the revised rules.