Col1967

Well, what else could it have been to cause such a tremendous spike in sales?

Indeed it is not to be sniffed at but the point I am making is that there was a very specific reason for it to have been selling so many copies in that particular week. I said 'one off' in relation to the sales immediately preceeding & following this week, rather than sales many week beforehand.

That was the 'Mother's Day effect' though. Very much a one-off week if you look at the sales. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_in_British_music

It all depends on what factors affecting a track's sales you consider to be 'fair' or not. Some tracks may have massively more promo than others but I don't think many people would consider that to be unfair competition. Heck, some tracks are simply *better* than others :) Price however is a pretty crude tactic. In the early 2000s, along with the release to radio several weeks before physical release creating massive pent-up demand, the CD singe was 1.99 in the first week rising to 3.99 thereafter. This led to an even greater frenzy to buy in the ist week to secure a high chart position. Imagine the effect on today's charts if tracks routinely started out at 59p (or even lower) and rose to 99p in the second week.......

I don't like the idea of the top chart positions being decided by what is essentially a 'price war'. Introduce random oldies at 59p or squeeze a few extra sales from a dying single by all means, but I'd like MLJ to be number one on a level playing field, not just because it's been reduced to 'bargain bin' status.

I too downloaded from the original Napster. In my case it was getting old tracks that couldn't be obtained in any other way. I never downloaded any current tracks, although I wasn't following the charts at the time anyway. This was in the very early 2000s, some years before downloading legally became common. You couldn't just hop onto iTunes and get whatever you wanted! If I want an 'oldie' today, that's what I do.

I'm convinced DJs talked more than was necessary over intros in order to make home taping less attractive.

Home taping? I couldn't *possibly* comment :)

I might well have wanted to buy 5 singles a week when I was 16, but couldn't possibly have afforded it, so that was just too bad. I didn't steal what I didn't have the money to buy.

I laugh at those who think 99p is too expensive for a single and that they can't afford it. 99p? Good grief, when I first started buying singles in 1984 they must have been around that price. Albums certainly were in the 5-6 GBP range. Adjusting for inflation and higher disposable income singles were *far* more expensive 25 years ago than they are today, yet still people complain they can't get everything they want. Kids today, they don't know they're born.....

Ha ha, I was alive for one quarter of the 60s :) But you make a good point. People will always look back at the era they grew up as having the best music. And for me that's the 80s, and especially the early 80s.

Maroon 5 are miles in front on popbars so it will be a while before they overhaul them, though I suspect they will at some point. I think perhaps that Maroon 5 will just about hold The Saturdays off for number one next week, though. They have been selling consistently for a couple of weeks now, and sales won't be dipping significantly this week. Depends how front-loaded The Saturdays are.

It's interesting that a few years ago when downloads became prevalent total single sales rose to record levels, but this was due to the 'long tail' of so many more tracks selling in modest amounts than was ever possible before. Sales towards the top end stayed very low compared to previous years which had considerably lower total sales. Looks like now the 'head' as it were, is starting to catch up.

I meant unoriginal with respect to all those of this year's X-Factor contestants who must be thinking of performing it.

Probably weeping at the fact that people are choosing such an obvious, unoriginal track to perform on X-Factor.

Agreed. That is assuming that all those who bought Amy Winehouse tracks did so as extra purchases on top of what they were already buying. However in reality people only have a limited amount of money to spend so had she not died, other tracks would have sold a bit more, and it wouldn't necessarily have been evenly spread around the chart. In this alternative universe where she is still alive the chart would probably look slightly different to one that simply has all the AW tracks removed.

But usually when we say 'country' we mean an independent country. Furthermore if you are going to have Scotland's chart, the rest of the UK should be broken down in the charts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. To say a single has been no.1 in both the UK and Scotland is a bit of a nonsense as the sales from one chart are merely part of the other. You might as well say it has been no.1 in both the UK and London.

What a great site, you could spend hours looking throgh the archives. Did you know for example that 'Knowing me Knowing you' reached no.5 in Costa Rica? No, neither did I.

Agreed. I find the whole thing rather grisly to be honest. You could have all the promo you wanted for her back catalogue when she was alive and nobody would've noticed. The moment she's dead people suddenly discover they need a copy of 'Back to Black'. They've had quite a few years now to buy it, the music hasn't changed so why wait until she's dead to do it? It's not a new phenomenon of course. The 'dead pop star' effect happened with Elvis and John lennon too.

March 1980. I still remember Tony Blackburn announcing that The Jam had gone straight into number one with 'Going Underground'. Little did I know just how unusual that was at the time. I had been aware of pop music and the charts since about 1978 but this was the time I started following them properly, religiously writing down the top 10 every week in a little book.

I prefer tracks to be OAOS. That way it a track can be seen to grow in popularity naturally as airplay picks up and people hear it and buy it, rather than having weeks of pent-up demand with tracks crashing in at their highest position and then plummeting, as almost always happened from about 1995 until the start of the download era. That just seems so 'artificial' to me. I started following the charts properly in 1980 so perhaps it's not surprising that I find OAOS to be the 'proper' way the charts should behave. Somebody who started in 2000 might find several new entries in the top five every week exciting, and tracks taking many weeks to peak rather slow & boring. To them that would be 'normal'.

And finishing off with a cheap shot about the Koreans eating dogs.

Well obviously, and no 2s as well of course, the record is 7 weeks. Dunno about the record for no.3 but I do remember 'Sledgehammer' by Peter Gabriel spending 4 straight weeks at no.4 in 1986. Anyway my point was that spending 5 consecutive weeks at as low a position as no.83 is quite remarkable. Just remembered, the wonderfully named Elbow Bones and the Racketeers spent 4 weeks at no.33 in 1984 with 'A Night in New York'. Great song too.

Most consecutive weeks in the same chart position would deserve a thread all of it's own (and probably has in the past) but I doubt anything would surpass the statistical fluke of Take That's 'Rule the World' spending 5 consecutive weeks at no.83. http://www.chartstats.com/release.php?release=33211

Probably long forgotten by now but 'If you're Looking for a Way Out' by Odyssey in 1980 spent six weeks in the top 10. 56-34-29-20-7-7-7-{6}-7-10-16-24-37-61-71