I'll just put forward that the charts, the #1 single, whether it matters or not is entirely up to you. By all accounts it's just frivolous record keeping that can serve as a time capsule for future generations, though it's been clear for a long time that those future generations are more than happy to pick & choose both within and out those bounds. Some of the smartest people I know have no interest in music past the neoclassicism era, while another set of the smartest people I know get deeply invested in all the works of Olivia Rodrigo. If you have the time and desire to entertain yourself then it can be with whatever you want it to be, to whatever degree you want. Maybe you're interested in what year has the most #100 debuts, or which artist has the most songs that have spent at least 10 weeks on the chart, or even just the airplay chart, the world's your oyster.

The only thing is that we tend to be very self-serving about this, which is where the conflict arrives. To say 'It doesn't matter anymore' is code for 'I've lost interest', and that means they've either found a new distraction, or the aspects they tended to enjoy no longer serve them. There isn't a single moment when the charts became obsolete, but if someone new you don't like stole your record away, you can bet you're gonna count backwards to find a viable moment to discredit them. I do the same thing too. Last year there was a footy stat that I was deeply invested in, purely because one of my favourite players was leading it by a country mile. This year they missed some games and aren't playing as well, so they're not leading the stat, and I've convinced myself it doesn't matter as much. Now my fixation is seeing if my team can get themselves off the bottom rung of the average tackles leaderboard of the season, because that's just the thing I find interesting right now.

If someone tells me they're interested in the charts, more so than I am, I'm not going to get all uppity at them for finding something interesting just because 'It used to be better' or 'It used to matter'. Let them enjoy it. In the past week I've gotten up early to watch a women's football practice game that I've seen all of 3 people talk about, I broke one of my old uncontested world records in a niche category for a niche video game 3 times in the space of an hour, and I've continued to spend hours working on my music blog that only a handful of my friends actively read. I'm having a great time. Finding something to be invested in is a lot more fun than lamenting that no one cares.

I don’t feel like we say this quite enough but dircadirca really is quite wonderful <3

Charting does matter a lot, some artists can get dropped from their labels or given less support/budget if they don't chart well.

Does getting the number 1 matter as much? More for the artists as its hard to get a number 1 nowadays when you have songs like RMI and Choosin Texas refusing to budge from the no.1 spot for weeks on end. Trying to get a top 10 placement is the most you can hope for recently.

What I’ve noticed is that when a song went to number one on the Big Top 40, they are added to the Capital Playlist. There are a few exceptions such as the Xmas & Charity songs, Anywhere Away From Here, BACKBONE, Defying Gravity, We Don’t Talk About Bruno, Now & Then, Tattoo, Who, Abracadabra (Wes Nelson) and Three Lions (in 2018 till they were knocked out of the World Cup). There were a few others that were played but only for a short period but most of them are still on Capital from time to time

7 minutes ago, Sami Hook Jama said:

What I’ve noticed is that when a song went to number one on the Big Top 40, they are added to the Capital Playlist. There are a few exceptions such as the Xmas & Charity songs, Anywhere Away From Here, BACKBONE, Defying Gravity, We Don’t Talk About Bruno, Now & Then, Tattoo, Who, Abracadabra (Wes Nelson) and Three Lions (in 2018 till they were knocked out of the World Cup). There were a few others that were played but only for a short period but most of them are still on Capital from time to time

Some of those capital inclusions make sense (Rag/Pink, Beatles, Encanto, Wicked, 3 Lions).

I don’t get why Backbone, Tattoo, Who, & Abracadabra (Wes) wouldn’t be play listed though.

I dont think the big top 40 number 1 is any better even if it was remotely credible , you just have different songs hogging the top instead

20 hours ago, ChrisJK said:

Here's an observation. Make of it what you will...

I was watching breakfast TV this morning and Frank Skinner was on it. They asked him about Three Lions and he said he still loved it.

Then he said he had been told an interesting stat that he's had more no 1s than David Bowie, as he's been no.1 four times.

He pointed out that his were all the same song and it was an injustice... But it made me look up the evidence...

Three Lions has been no 1 THREE times, and two of these were non-consecutive on its first run (so not four times).

David Bowie has had THREE solo no 1s and two more in collabs. So really, FIVE no 1s.

So where did anyone get the stats that Frank Skinner had four no 1s and that was more than Bowie... But it was believable enough to be mentioned on TV this morning...

David Baddiel also said he had "four number ones" when he was on Taskmaster but he was clearly joking.

Is the three lions thing complicated because Three lions and Three lions 98 were technically classed as different releases until recently ?

Yes, the 1998 version of 'Three Lions' has a separate OCC entry and was counted separately until the digital era when both versions have been combined.

So it is correct that it has been at #1 on 4 separate occasions (2 in 1996, 1 in 1998 and 1 in 2018)

By extension, it is technically correct that Frank Skinner has been at #1 on more separate occasions (4) than David Bowie solo songs have (3 - none of them returned to #1), but that's not the same thing as having more #1s.

2 hours ago, Highway Unicorn said:

Some of those capital inclusions make sense (Rag/Pink, Beatles, Encanto, Wicked, 3 Lions).

I don’t get why Backbone, Tattoo, Who, & Abracadabra (Wes) wouldn’t be play listed though.

Who and Abracadabra sounded perfect for Capital. They playlisted a few BTS & Wes Nelson tracks in the past.

BACKBONE sounded a bit too rough for Capital despite having Stormzy on the track and with Tattoo, there’s not really much point having a past Eurovision contestant who won the show twice on the playlist despite it being popular

I’m not sure why they didn’t keep Sam Ryder, Mae Muller or Remember Monday on the playlist/recurrents list as long as Years & Years did with their hits on Capital. Same for Yxng Bane, P!nk, Craig David (despite them both being on Capital Anthems), Chase & Status (I’m sure Blind Faith was playlisted in the past and then disappeared), BTS (bar Dynamite and the like)

Edited Tuesday at 16:191 day by Sami Hook Jama

It's an oft-asked question isn't it, both casually in everyday conversations, and more widely in national media, and we're oft-told the same answer: that it can still matter - and definitely does to some, depending on circumstances - but in the main, it matters quite a bit less as to what song or which act is currently at Number 1, on either the singles or albums charts (the latter was of course never as important to pop music followers and chart fans as the former, even in the heyday of the 'pop' format and during the earlier, novel years of there being weekly charts ranking their relative popularity by paid-for sales of recorded product).

I would now love to go ahead and blast that conclusion out of the water, or at least carefully and stealthily unstitch it to reveal its inadequacies or lack of reliability. But, as an all-round statement that provides a convenient short answer to the question, I actually think it rather hits the nail on the head. And I think the various responses to it on this thread underline that. If one is very interested in pop music per se, and/or very absorbed by the way it is analysed through charts, and/or really enjoys following whatever is current musically, and/or is actively involved in some capacity in the music industry via performing/producing/writing/promoting/managing etc, then chances are, whatever one felt about the charts in yesteryears gone by, one will have a regard for, and greater knowledge of, what goes on with them today. It's either a labour of love, a professional necessity, or a bit of both.

Yet we must remember that for the vast majority, who are (and possibly always were) fairly casual music listeners or chart followers (and typically at a young stage in their lives too, unless they found a career within the business itself later), none of these three predicaments truly apply. In fact, most people are actually just listening fairly passively, taking little notice of the official figures, stats etc, and just enjoy the musical output at their own pace and at their own level - be that more comprehensively or less so. Many suspect that not that much notice is even really being taken of the music played (hence the concept of 'passive streaming')! Besides any artists for whom they have a particular special passion, and for whom they may pay a disproportionate amount of money to enjoy and spend a skewed amount of their time to do so, it's likely to be mostly passive listening via pre-conceived streaming site playlists, or traditional radio, television or internet plays that makes up the average typical person's musical intake. And all the while immersed in a deeply varied, fast-moving, fickle and often shallow mix of competing interests from diverse sources, all distracting from what was once a simpler, smaller set of more universal appeals, of which current pop music and its performance in chart terms was once one - and a big one, at that. Sad though it is for those of us of an age or generation to have actively enjoyed a more chart-centric pop culture through less-flexible but more-straightforward media, it was perhaps always inevitable that popular music, notwithstanding all its potential musical variety and diversity, was heading for a rut, not just given its three-four-minute limited commercial form, but the exhaustion of so many entertainment and artistic possibilities within it in just half a century. No wonder music began to sound somewhat similar, recycled, reinterpreted, revisited or a diluted distillation of something that'd already gone before. It's the way it is - not just an anti-youth or pro-older music instinct.

And so it probably follows logically that the charts created to measure it, good or bad, consistent or not, eventually became stale too, and started to reflect more about the clever ways the industry was marketing its artists' products and less about the appeal or novelty of the content itself. This began in the 1980s, and took a hold in earnest in the 1990s. As the gradual development of physical formats eventually gave way to the digital equivalent in the 2000s, and in only one decade moving away from paid purchases altogether (buying) and towards rented listens via the internet (streaming) come the close of the 2010s, this was only going to impact the shape and character of those charts even more, which again probably inevitably began a process of older listeners/followers feeling increasingly distanced from the modern incarnation of the same beast, as well as increasingly nostalgic for the way they perceived it to have been done in times gone by, likely with youthful enthusiasm and naive innocence still on their side. The hard truth is buying and streaming music are two entirely different means of consuming it, yet both arguably are key representations of measuring the popularity of it. Hence an official chart that attempts to cover both, yet naturally falls short in many ways through its ill-conceived and clunky methods of trying to translate rented streams into paid buys, to create the nebulous and poorly-understood 'consumption unit', all predicated on entirely arbitrary conversions. That isn't a formula to encourage anyone towards taking the resultant tabulations seriously, be they young or old, lovers of the music featured or otherwise.

Each generation wants to claim something as its own, even if that can no longer strictly-speaking be 'new' or 'original' when set against what's passed before, and whatever that is should be reflected by the corresponding era's charts, but there is no real doubt that gradually, since the turn of the century, fewer pop fans have actively cared about what those rankings were, and the increasingly manipulated and complicated manner in which they come about. The internet ironically allows more people more access to more music and more entertainment generally than ever before, yet this only serves to minimise the average engagement per capita with each separate source or phenomenon, in terms of both depth of interest and time spent. What we've all been given with one hand, perhaps has been taken away to some degree with another.

In summary, given the state of popular music after 80 short and explosive years, the way in which it is preferably consumed by the majority, and the competition from external media generally, meant that 'the charts' - or at least the way in which a majority of people viewed or engaged with them - could never have stayed the same as what it was 25+ years since. The interesting observation here is that while some steadfast and stoic older hands are still trying to get their heads around that reality and deal with the inadequacy and incompatability arising from it, a much-larger portion of the population are simply resigned not to notice or care too much, whether that be a gradual, subconscious process, or a sudden, deliberate one. Then again, they're probably not caring too much more about many other competing aspects of popular entertainment either. The music charts are not the only thing to have diminished or lost out in the digitally-driven world.

It's only really relevant to a niche audience of music nerds these days. Many of those who remember the good old days have reached the "modern music is rubbish" stage of their life whilst many youngsters don't even know there's such a thing as the charts. I've written a post about it myself:

https://myrandommusicblog.blogspot.com/2026/07/18-week-number-1.html