Gambo

It is clearly in for an especially-extended chart run, even by today's streaming-saturated standards, and despite the joint threats of the primary artist cap potentially pushing the song out of the official published version of our chart should three more be consumed more in any week, and ACR artificially halving its streaming value and thereby forcing it downwards in position, it has an excellent chance of seeing it through. I do doubt whether it can survive the week or two over Christmas this year still within the Top 40 echelon, but remain more confident that the title will cling on to a Top 75 and even more likely Top 100 berth across those challenging weeks. At the very least, 'Rein Me In' - and 'Man I Need' - will both almost certainly still be streamed sufficiently to maintain a constant presence on the combined Top 200 tracks chart - i.e. the 'real' one we don't get to see that is free from any manipulations to render the rankings more convenient for the industry to present - through Christmas and well-beyond, possibly even into Xmas 2027!!

For all the interesting ideas and diverse debate, it seems we're no closer to a consensus on how best a singular, national, official, catch-all single tracks chart should operate. Perhaps there simply isn't a sufficiently detailed, fair, even and honest way of compiling such weekly rankings nowadays, what with the multiple methods of accessing and appreciating music (not to mention many other competing forms of personal entertainment in the real and virtual worlds). The singles chart 'of old' - say in the sales-only era, wasn't perfect; any 'chartologist' will attest to that, whether it be limitations of compilation, methodology, arbitrary imposition at various times of rules, the need to suit the sponsoring industry bodies first before the consumer, and so forth. But at least it was simple enough - count up what seem to be genuine paid-for purchases of available product and rank them. Okay it was never quite that straightforward, what with verification, anti-hype mechanisms etc, but you know what I mean - whether it be manual or automated data, physical or digital, processed using fast-paced IT - it was a basic totting-up. Granted, sales were only ever one means of measuring popularity of product, even in the less-diverse, pre-digital era. But it was as good a measure as any, and people broadly understood it, whether or not they were aware of the glitches, difficulties, faults and unevenness of the resultant weekly countdown. Yet with streaming blended into sales - two entirely distinct modes of music consumption - it immediately presented the compilers (Kantar) and custodians (OCC) with complex problems, some of which only really became truly apparent as the sector matured a few years in, and inevitably, compromises were made that skewed what had been, for a decade or so, a pretty clean-cut genuine weekly tabulation of what was not so much best-selling, but most-streamed, or - overall - 'most-consumed' titles across seven days. It would've been easier had streaming just become the main means of consumption to the extent that sales no longer happened, or were so minimal as to be statistically irrelevant and so not worth counting any longer. While streaming has cannibalised much of the old single-track sales market, it's not done so to that degree where sales can just be ignored. So the two have to co-exist as meaningful measures of a song's popularity. And what of any other popularity measures, which some argue should be thrown into an ever-complexifying mix? It's perhaps fortunate for the industry that it's mostly only their problem - if they see one at all - and that fewer consumers of musical product care about the official weekly charts than ever before. We operate in a bit of a bubble here where we all still really care! Yet most stay ignorant and happily so because their interest in charts has waned to zero, or passing casual observation - partly due to the maturity of popular music as a format but also thanks to those same charts becoming over-complicated due to the need to respond to changes in the consumption market. A bit of chicken-and-egg really. So, things like the streaming issue above may never actually be addressed, any more than the inequities and inadequacies of the current Top 100 will be. Some say the answer is getting access, or even full reversion, to the 'real' Top 200 combined rankings. It's true, those are accurate and honest. But many on this thread ideally want more movement and more diversity, more turnover and more access for new acts/songs in a chart. What little reportage about the actual, true Top 200 tracks shows us is that it's even more stagnant and stale than the manipulated 100, as streaming encompasses so many millions of titles across all genres, and all types/ages of consumer are latching on and streaming anything, but often the same 'classic' songs, ad-infinitum, going way beyond the limited compositional choices of the modern era. And so the singles chart reflects that, as it stands. Yes, OCC must keep compiling a real ranking, even if it is never made public as it'd shine the spotlight on the artificial aspects of their official version which they want to pass off as pre-eminent and being of historical record. But converting back to that as the official listings isn't now a solution, if it ever was, to the problems confronted here. All that being said, I just keep looking, with my thinking cap on, at the spread of charts currently produced by OCC, and wonder whether there is any way they could, in time, champion some sort of 'new releases' type tabulation. It wouldn't be the 'real' or even 'main' chart, as it would exclude certain titles and perhaps encourage others, depending on its qualification criteria (a debate to be had in itself). This seems to me to be somewhat preferable to trying to upgrade any of the genre-specific charts, which all harbour similar issues to the main one anyway, and operate differently depending on how well a genre or kind of artist performs in the different sectors that make up the combined consumption tally. The problem wouldn't be how to set such a chart up, compiling it or presenting it - rather, it would be how to give it sufficient profile as to rival, if not ultimately supersede, the main chart in the minds of both industry bods and regular consumers. And whether that could ever be countenanced by those paying for it? The main chart would always be there as a barometer of the overall market's performance each week and through time. But I think seeking to fiddle with that is a fool's errand, and perhaps the best way forward is to gradually downgrade it in favour of a tabulation that exists specifically to measure and chart the performance of newer material, or - if it were felt important - also genuinely-resurgent older content. I guess this is a tall order as the OCC have never favoured 'rival' charts (part of the reason they ended up having to present a combined chart in the first place was because having two separate streams and sales listings was seen as confusing and wouldn't serve the perceived need for a 'single source of truth' for posterity's sake - even if that source is slightly skewed from reality to suit industry preference and convenience!). And inevitably there'd be keen debate about the exact rules for such a chart, exclusions and so on. Yet I'd suggest that these may be less irksome than now, as we'd be dealing not with the 'main' singles chart, but a special 'sub' chart focused on current happenings. It wouldn't pretend to be 'complete' and cover everything, so maybe it'd matter less if certain rules and regs were applied to it, in order to keep it fresh and functioning in the way it should? In the end, they could abandon the faked Top 100 altogether, just keeping the honest 200 as a background barometer, but with the 'new stuff' tabulation nudged to the foreground in media terms. Don't get me wrong folks; I very-much doubt this would ever really come to pass. But for the purposes of the arguments here, in an ideal universe, I reckon we need to move beyond the 'main' chart as it stands and start building towards a separate, more focused, if in effect narrower and more regulated, ranking to give weekly relative indications as to which recent (or recently-reignited) titles are leading the pack, and as it gains profile, so would the music qualifying to feature within it, even albeit on far-fewer total listens or buys than some of the stuff in the main table. While the main list would always exist, it'd be this new countdown that could create much more excitement, even though it would of course never recreate the buzz around the charts per se that existed in the latter half of the 20th century - sadly, that boat has long-since sailed.

I used to be astonished that the OCC apparently didn't have the capacity to determine which streams had been ordered-up on demand and which were just passively listened-to via a pre-conceived playlist put together by the provider. However, it's struck me since that they will only receive data in the way that streaming services are able (and more importantly, willing) to supply to them for chart compilation purposes. I think the bottom line is that most if not all are not prepared to do the sort of granular breakdowns of their data that would be necessary to delineate between the two kinds of listen, and so there's not much the OCC can do about it. Even if it had resources to utilise the sort of tech required to do that kind of drilled-down analysis, if the data is simply only provided to them as a raw figure of how many listens there were over whatever the runtime limit is (is it 30 seconds?), then they can't then analyse it further to try and establish how many were passive and how many were on demand. Another aspect of streaming data reporting that still bewilders me - and which I genuinely can't believe cannot be rectified in today's high-tech, fast-paced world of data - is that the OCC are still having to estimate the streams for a whole day (Thursday)! Even in July 2017 when this car-crash combined chart had its various rules imposed to try and contain the unwanted effects of streaming, that seemed a bit old hat, akin to when BMRB (and initially even Gallup, with all their computing prowess brought to bear) still couldn't collect data comprehensively or quickly enough to compile a Christmas week chart! Yet here we are, nine years on, and apparently Thursday streams are still entirely guessed at thanks to lack of proper data. I'm hardly expert on this area, but as a layman outsider, I can't help but feel this has to be more to do with streaming services' laziness than a lack of technical capacity to compile and provide the actual data for Thursday in time for the new chart to be processed and published the following day. The OCC has many faults, some of which it absolutely could fix itself, and so far totally refuses to bother doing so, even when people from fora like this let them know in no uncertain terms! But some issues with the chart's compilation are I think more to do with the services providing streaming data than the company tasked with marshalling it all.

We also heard the same thing during the fairly rapid transition from physical to digital paid-for sales in the mid-'00s. I recall reading some press suggesting that the download, for all its novelty and appeal to youth, was hardly reinvigorating a generally moribund music market, and that their sales at that stage weren't anything close to what CDs had been at their peak, nor cassettes, nor vinyl. Whilst that might've been a statement of fact, the format did eventually grow to overall annual totals far in excess of what'd been managed over store counters even in the heydays of physical in the late '70s and late '90s; it just took a few more years (until the early '10s) for it to peak (it then staged a rather more precipitous withdrawal from the market as it got cannibalised by streaming instead of course, but that's another story). Moreover, someone made the valid observation (possibly Alan Jones, possibly James Masterton) that with so many more individual tracks available digitally to buy, including increasingly large dollops of catalogue songs, and of course all B-sides and album cuts as well as just true 'singles', it would be inevitable that your average typical music buyer's spend would probably only go so far, and that they might well end up choosing to purchase more older or non-current titles rather than focus all their aural attentions on here-and-now releases. I think the example cited, which was very topical at the time, was Rihanna's 'Umbrella', which managed a still-impressive ten weeks atop the official chart, mostly on digital sales, but it was only shifting maybe 25-35,000 copies each week to do so. The author argued this was still pretty worthy when set against a market of millions of songs to choose from, as opposed to the mere 400-500 or so one might be able to source from stores in the physical era. So while the tallies seemed considerably lower than in the past, one wasn't quite comparing like with like. I'd say it's the same in the streaming era too - with so many possibilities musically across all artists, eras and genres, and with only so much time able to be devoted to digital listening, any single title managing say 40K streaming-equivalent 'sales' units in a week actually looks pretty impactful, given the sheer depth, breadth and width of the competition. Perhaps it isn't really legitimate to expect current chart-toppers achieving their position largely through streams to ever manage too much more than 60 or 70K in a seven-day frame; which in my book definitely makes it a notable achievement when any track manages it - and does so sufficient to remain ahead of all the pack for almost 20 weeks! It's just that that level of attainment can't really be measured fairly alongside the sales-based equivalents of say, the '80s. It's two different types of consumption and we mustn't forget that although they've been spliced together and awkwardly massaged into a single figure to suit official chart compilation purposes, they're actually two different beasts and don't make good bedfellows. As for monoculture, well, hasn't that been the allegation of every generation or decade's music since the dawn of rock?! It isn't entirely without foundation, but it doesn't mean it's a really fair assessment of current trends in music, or a key driver behind how tracks behave in our charts.

What an interesting idea for a thread! It's hard to find any really 'new' ideas on chart fora which haven't already been thought-through, researched in depth and presented elsewhere, but this is genuinely something I've not seen before. A bit too much of a skew towards 21st century material for my preferences. But then obviously certification of every track on an album was only really something that could've become a phenomenon from the download era onwards, when all tracks could be purchased individually irrespective of whether they received an official single release, and only really a regular phenomenon since the streaming era took hold, meaning that most music consumption is now measured on rented digital listens rather than purchases of the product. Hence certification of multiple tracks of all kinds goes up significantly across many more artists' repertoire, and every song on a long-player set has far greater potential to reach for a certification of some sort, in far less time after initial release. Yet I am in full agreement with the earlier post who observed that Catfish and The Bottlemen's LP feels like a bit of an outlier among these other acts, most of whom are megastars and huge hitters in streaming (and in some cases sales too) contexts and who are so well-established and well-known among the populace that even those who don't listen to popular music, or enjoy its recent output, can't not have heard of them (Ed, Taylor, Adele, Justin et al). Yet C & TB are rather more niche by comparison, and they've never even managed a Top 10 hit single! Indeed, with the key exception of Arctic Monkeys, whose certification was as much if not more thanks to digital (and to a fair extent physical) sales across each of its songs, guitar-driven and more old-school 'rock' acts are the ones that seem to have lost out most noticeably in the rapid transition away from paid sales and towards rented streams. I've never quite been able to pin down convincingly why that is. The genre went back to 1960s/'70s basics in the '90s and struck gold again after taking a relative backseat during the '80s, and kept its profile up through the 2000s, yet sometime around the '10s its interest waned to the point of barely being represented in the most-consumed listings. Okay, new rock artists still pop up more pertinently on the albums charts, but often only for a week or so on fanbase sales only. It's a novelty even now to see a rock or guitar-led song in the singles charts, unless it's a 'heritage' title that's receiving special 'TikTok' or 'Netflix' treatment etc. Unlike hip-hop/rap and its subgenres which seem to have proliferated and positively thrived in the streaming era, poor old rock (especially new bands) seems to have been largely overlooked on that metric. And with sales being so low, even good performance in that sector tends not to raise its profile that notably among most listeners. So, to see a C & TB album on this list is even more like a breath of fresh air (and I'm not even that big a rock music lover). I just wouldn't have thought that if there was a recent artist of that ilk to break with the overarching trend and receive major streaming attention, it would've been them!

As these recent regular updates testify, given the slow chart turnover and prospects for certain artists to have titles lodged in the Top Ten for many months largely due to long-term saturation (I suspect often passive) streaming, despite the threat of ACR to artificially remove them from it prematurely, I think this list is set to grow considerably, not just in weeks tallied for artists already beyond the 100 mark, but for new acts to join them, perhaps after relatively short spells of time. If the official chart's shape and character continues long-term without other tricks being introduced to try and manipulate it into something more 'convenient' (but less 'real'), it is perfectly possible that sooner or later someone will eclipse Elvis.

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.

That might be true. But it's not necessarily the case though - on the singles, cumulative streaming tallies of titles are compiled consistently at the 1:100 notional 'sale to streams' ratio, whereas the weekly official charts are of course compiled using differing ratios, depending on certain conditions (paid or ad-funded, SCR or ACR, etc).

Quite pleased it's Mark Goodier who'll be presenting this. An older-school, articulate, more authoritative delivery is required for such a milestone countdown (whatever the vagaries might be around its compilation methodology, data quality and so on which I daresay will lead to all kinds of debates afterwards!).

I must say, I opened this thread up thinking it would be a walk through all the tracks which should have been number ones in the United Kingdom, if the true weekly rankings for most-consumed songs were used officially instead of the artificially-manipulated positions we get, which sometimes obscure what the actual most popular title is (poor Olivia Dean has suffered this surely more than anyone, with 'Man I Need' being No 1 on the Top 200 combined tracks OCC chart for something like 11 weeks, but only 1 on the Top 100 official one - not that she's too bothered by that just now given her fantastic haul of BRIT awards secured over the weekend!). So a more precise title for this would seem to make sense. Like you though I can't immediately think of something that fits the bill!

^ Particularly when we have an entire era lacking in any sort of reliable weekly sales figures to use in order to make such calculations - and I'm not just referring to the pre-official (February 1969) period during which limited sales reports were converted into points to compile the charts; it wasn't really until as late as April 1997 that we had reliable enough returns of sales from nearly the entire UK market as 'defined universe' units on which to be more certain of which position each title should be at - and sadly to date we don't even have all the weekly tallies for each chart position even in that more accurate era (although admittedly most former No 1 singles' exact sales/consumption totals have been cited in Music Week reports in the week in which they are toppled, alongside the tally for the new No 1, since the late 2000s). Then since July 2017 we have the issue of tracks which were 'actual' or 'true' chart-toppers, but whose position was artificially lowered for the official published weekly chart purposes, thereby to some folks making the figures given for the official No 1 and positions below it somewhat less meaningful... Interesting thread though as you say. What it highlights most keenly to my mind is that if one truly cares about how big songs actually are, one must drill down into the consumption figures - be they weekly or to-date - in order to establish fairer comparisons between titles' performances. Chart positions in themselves tell us a much narrower picture of relative success, and arguably even less nowadays, given not just the artificiality of the official weekly rankings as presented by the OCC, but also the way songs can build up huge consumption tallies through time primarily via streaming-equivalent units, despite sometimes having no obvious weekly chart profile whatsoever.

Thanks KOS. This chart date - coincidentally (and somewhat preposterously) exactly 20 years ago today - was vaguely familiar to me and I couldn't quite recall why; it must've been the last 'missing' chart in the old OCC archives before they got uploaded (seem to recall an enquiry about missing physical singles charts from those weeks over on UKMix a while ago). Not being a computer-literate sort of chap, I admit to only feebly grasping the concept of "a change of export rules" leading to a slight reconfiguration of positions on a few selected charts in their archive. But does this mean in every case where we know the chart has been affected by this process that these apparently-differently (or more recently) exported versions we now see online are the correct ones, and that any earlier iteration can safely be discarded? Apologies if that should be clear above but maybe I'm missing something.

Interesting indeed - fortunately no track appears to have been 'demoted' out of the Top 75 by this apparent re-run. Just a re-configuration of existing positions within the last 36 of that part of the chart. I certainly don't recall any indication that there had been any known errors with the published version, either at the time or since.

Interesting one. Clearly the actual cast members of 'Glee' were the ones performing on their recorded releases, and so in that sense I suppose the answer is 'no', because they were real people singing on records and appearing in associated clips. But why did so many of their tracks sell/stream so well in the first place - if the assembly of vocalists had not branded themselves in such an obvious manner as clearly linked to the production of 'Glee', and their performances 'in character' as it were on the shows which evidently were intended to promote consumption of both the show and records, then would their material have become as popular as it was for a couple of years at the turn of the '00s/'10s? Probably not, so in another sense, it was the fictional element of their performances - the characters they were embracing while performing their particular type of choral covers and medleys of already-familiar numbers - which was key to The Glee Cast's act, which arguably makes them 'fictional' in the context of initial user engagement and commercial appeal. Oh God now this really is getting difficult!

I think it's the varied way in which one could define a term such as 'fictional' in respect of popular music history that makes it a debate worth having on sites like this though! The fact that it can be determined differently by different people - and even then it can be tricky to stay within one's own personal definitions consistently - does make it more complicated, but also more interesting... The Pinkfong thing is yet another complication as the more precise one gets, the less easy to readily define it is as to whether it should count as a 'fictional artist'.