Chig66

This has been a splendid way to spend the last hour or so! Thank you. I was doing quite well until I got to the quotes from a certain radio presenter, so there's now a big gap of four answers. Anyway, they're coming now...

That new Whitesnake album has visited each 'ten' of the update this week; top 10 on Monday, 11-20 on Tuesday, 21-30 on Wednesday and 31-40 today. It's slipped 8 places, then 9, then 10. So, I'm going to predict it slides a further 11 tomorrow and charts at #47. :D

I managed to f*** it up at the end! Spent too long thinking about one and put 16 I think!!

It's 'Everything She Wants' that I feel sorry for. ;-) It was a legitimate double A side with Last Christmas in 1984 (and the 1985 re-release), and one of the rare occasions where both sides of a double A side used to get played on the radio. Let's not forget that it was Band Aid that screwed up Wham! having the 1984 Christmas number one, but George Michael himself had happily contributed his vocals to Band Aid, knowing what would happen. So he ended up singing on the top 2 at Christmas, but it feels right that this has finally happened today, after such a long time. 'Last Christmas' definitely deserves to be a number one song. I've just remembered as well that George and Andrew ALSO donated their own royalties for Last Christmas to the Band Aid Trust in 1984. The trust still exists, so I wonder if that still happens? It could be that Andrew Ridgeley still hasn't made a single penny from this song!

It's interesting and amazing that 12 months ago there was a marketing push with Last Christmas. I bought a vinyl 7" copy of it in hmv. This time around, no special campaign or marketing, but it's almost happened by accident, helped by the way the dates have fallen. This was 'optimum Christmas' week for the chart, running from Christmas Day to NYE. I'm still amazed though, and sad that George isn't around to see it after so long.

Is it not Mr Acker Bilk then? :-)

It was #72 with one day to go, so it was hardly going to make the top 40 today.

I notice that today's industry update hasn't made its way onto here yet, but I can confirm that Wham! are #1 today and LadBaby are #74!

I thought I would have a go at this, but it turns out to be pretty difficult! I've only named three for sure. Lots of others are familiar, but I can't name them (and some I have no idea about). Aaaagh! :-)

How the heck do you manage to play these seven foot discs? In fact, how do you even get them home? :lol:

Has Robyn upset someone? Doesn't she deserve a little asterisk too? ;)

Dancing Queen is on both films' soundtrack albums, by different (but overlapping) groups of people. Is it definitely the sequel version that's charting? Or would the presence of Julie Walters and Christine Baranski on both versions be enough for the OCC to lump them together now? The version from the first Mamma Mia! is by Meryl Streep & Julie Walters & Christine Baranski. The sequel version is by Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan.

Done!

This is a terrible way to find out that Paul McCartney has died. :lol: (If, by any chance, he hasn't, he was 75 years, 6 months and 4 days old yesterday, when the chart came out. That makes him two and a half years older than Brenda Lee! He's at #38.)

Where is this Welsh chart? It's not produced by the OCC, although their Wikipedia page (I know, I know) says they used to produce one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Charts_Company

This week's album chart new entries are brought to you by a Mike Leigh film... :lol:

Just in case anyone is alarmed by this post, I feel obliged to point out that Katie Melua is (still) not dead. :D

James Masterton (not Masterson) wasn't revealing any state secrets here. He was just quoting the stats in this Official Charts update from Monday. (Shame on him if he didn't credit the source of his information.) http://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/s...1-album__18331/

Those 'Shape Of You' remixes have certainly done the trick for Ed Sheeran! After declining in both sales and streams every week since it was released (and therefore declining in total chart units too), this week sees an upturn already, after only five days. This is week 8 for the song, and that total of 100,700 chart units already this week takes it above its week 7, week 6 and week 5 totals. It's very close to its week 4 total of 105,456 too, so this could be the song's fourth most successful week of its eight so far. It could even be its third biggest week, if it can break through 119,658 chart units.

The same data sources were missing last Monday too (except with Tesco on Saturday missing this week, which I imagine is of minimal significance), so it's almost a like-for-like comparison.

I wasn't forgetting - I didn't know! It'll be interesting to see if that arrests the gradual decline of Shape Of You, as it didn't work for Castle On The Hill. The video for that came out seven days ago, but the track still finished the week 10.8% down on its chart units from the previous week.

Shape of You's chart units today are 10% down on the same period last week. On the current trajectory, it's probably heading for around 108k units by Thursday night.

The sales are still as shown, obviously, but, for the benefit of those who can't be bothered to work out the chart units, under the old 100:1 ratio, today's figures would be; 1. Shape Of You: 86,500 sales + 39,000 streaming points = 125,500 chart units 2. Castle On The Hill: 76,600 sales + 39,000 streaming points = 115,600 chart units (Using the same assumption as above, that just under four million streams for each song so far is 3.9 million each.)

The OCC website says that the two Ed Sheeran tracks have clocked up just under 4 million streams each. So, if we guesstimate that figure as 3.9 million each, that means the chart units shown above include 26,000 streaming points for each song. That gives a breakdown for each song so far as; 1. Shape Of You: 86,500 sales + 26,000 streaming points = 112,500 chart units 2. Castle On The Hill: 76,600 sales + 26,000 streaming points = 102,600 chart units This means that Shape of You has already sold more than ANY number one last year, beating Lukas Graham's best week in just three days. Castle On The Hill has almost done it too (and will do easily before Thursday night). As Hadji says above, the next sales target to beat is the 124,340 that A Bridge Over You sold, just over 12 months ago.

Flippin' 'eck! That's more chart units clocked up by Shape Of You in just three days than all but seven weeks' number ones made (in the whole week) for the entirety of last year! And that's with one day's streaming points missing!