Gambo

Interesting topic! I suppose anyone who's known me for any serious length of time realises I have a pretty thorough knowledge of pop music and especially the UK charts (or at least HAD - I confess it's weaker now than it was 25-40 years ago), and so it's all taken as part and parcel of my character really, and not thought of as especially odd anymore. Saying that, I don't feel the subject really comes up in regular routine sociable conversations with my current circles of friends that much, partly because my knowledge can get a bit too 'granular' for them to hold any interest in, and partly because a large number of my chums are my own age or older, sometimes by 10-30 years. So such folk generally don't have any awareness of, or interest in, more recent/current chart content, limiting any chat about it to earlier decades which perhaps they considered 'their era'. Anything before the 1980s I know about but not to the extent I do for after that time as I wasn't born until the mid-1970s, so even then it can fall through the cracks quite readily and it's just easier to avoid boring people with too much data/trivia they'd only find fascinating if they held similarly strong attachment to the charts as I do. And let's face it folks, most people don't, even less than might've been the case in the latter decades of the 20th century. In the '80s and '90s, when I was most into listening to and buying into the singles charts, I was undoubtedly dismissed by some as a 'chart geek', impressing, bewildering and irritating people in equal measures with the depth and breadth of my knowledge! Though with more contemporary people then still engaged with and interested in pop, that wasn't such a negative thing; as someone said earlier our sort of specialised knowledge can and has proved very successful with pop quizzes, and when one brings home a load of beer or money for one's mates to share thanks to one's geekery (happened a few times while at University), then one tends not to be too unpopular for long! As the '00s and '10s passed I found myself less and less interactive with what was classed as modern pop and what troubled the weekly charts, although a general handle on the way they work and the wider market remains. Sadly though a lot of that kind of stuff won't win me any prizes at pub quizzes etc and my awareness of who had a hit with what, what number it reached and when etc isn't now anywhere near as encyclopaedic as it once was, meaning I have effectively 'retired' from such participation. Actually, when's the last time I even saw a pure POP quiz being held? All seems to be so-called 'general knowledge' nowadays... Happily though I have found that in the last 20 years at least, UKMix, and to a lesser but still relevant extent BuzzJack, have provided all the necessary outlets I seem to require in order for me to really indulge those trivial and obsessive aspects of this now more niche topic online, in a way that I know will be shared, respected and even enjoyed. So I appreciate still being on board with you all!

It is true that record labels in the UK only really began to give up on the front-loaded, two-month build-ups for key single releases in order to sell as many copies as possible and chart as highly as they could in the second half of the '10s, when it was becoming ever-more evident that online streaming of music was rapidly cannibalising paid-for sales and that consumers were comfortably being hurried along to move away from purchasing and towards renting their songs. The attempt at 'on air, on sale' Ben mentions above in early '11 was commendable, especially to those consumers frequently frustrated by the apparently most protracted delays to anticipated releases occurring in the UK, often coming months after they'd dropped in other countries, but in hindsight it was just a few years too premature. One could say it was ahead of its time, but besides the concept simply reviving the status quo that had existed for four decades prior to the early '90s, it was only really the mass exodus away from buying over to streaming in a short number of years that rendered OA, OS more apt and long-term pre-release promos increasingly irrelevant.

Yeah of course Robbie, TOTP would've certainly been the sooner reveal for regular viewers than the Top 40 show, by some three days. And it inevitably set stores up for the next few days into the weekend for higher sales, primarily of whichever singles happened to feature on the show that Thursday, so it was very influential for those who actually bought most if not all their singles at that time. However, as a youngster with no real capital of my own so to speak, there was no way I could've persuaded my parents to go out and buy all the songs I liked from the charts - so recording off the Sunday show became the answer as usually the entire track would be played more-or-less (especially if a new entry or climber) and once we got FM stereo the quality of radio recordings really got good. This (and the occasional purchase of hits compilations) became my way of consuming chart singles for two decades! I only seldom had a single bought for me, or later went out and bought it myself - either due to the recording being poor or incomplete or if I really, REALLY liked the song. I tend to use the term 'Sunday to Saturday week' with the older charts as that was what it was latterly, but yes, until the mid-'90s Monday was indeed the first regular retail day, in alignment with the calendar week, unless of course that fell on a Bank Holiday etc which would mean a later start to the shops opening. So in effect we had a six-day chart survey week. This to my mind made Sunday an even more apt day for chart compilation and eventually its first broadcast, as it was the retail-free 'day off' in between the end of one sales survey period and the start of the next. Hence partly why I still find this split week Friday to Thursday frame rather counter-intuitive, almost regardless of the original reasons why it was enacted, which Graham has enlarged upon above. Given today's streaming and sales patterns, I really don't think it would've mattered if they'd retained the original chart week ending Saturday, but there we are. One thing I am in agreement with, despite all my soundings in favour of the old system, is that now, ten years in, we should neither seek nor expect things to change back to how they were. One major shift in survey frames every 50 years is enough and for the duration, for all its faults, we should now just sit back and stay consistent to the Friday chart.

Well of course, in a sense, in the UK, Tuesday did used to be the chart reveal day, even when the week ran more conventionally from Sunday to Saturday, during the period when the compilers of the chart weren't able to crunch all their data swiftly enough to have a complete new chart prepared for radio broadcast the first day after the close of the survey week, i.e. Sunday. It wasn't available for many years until Tuesday, which would be when the new chart would first be counted down, three days into the week in which it was current, leaving what we all heard on the more detailed, expanded two-hour Sunday show as a catch-up on the week that had just passed, rather than the one ahead. This didn't resolve until October 1987 when computer compilation was such that a reliable chart was finally able to be made available to Radio 1 by Sunday afternoon in time for their main chart show, rendering the old Tuesday lunchtime slot redundant. I still wonder how many youngsters pre-Oct '87 knew that the chart they were hearing and likely recording selected songs from on Sundays was in fact a week out of date?! Given I was only four when I began listening concertedly to it I'm sure I couldn't have known; it must only have been sometime after I started primary school a year later and heard some people talking about the Tuesday programme that I cottoned on (even then being a schoolchild I was hardly ever able to hear that show live - some might've bunked off in order to do that but I'd never get away with that as my mum was always home and there'd have been hell to pay - I was lucky to be allowed to purloin the hi-fi for two hours on a Sunday!). It does highlight that a Tuesday is a bit of a crap day for a chart reveal broadcast, especially among those still committed to a school regime, but of course nowadays anyone that bothered can just listen to it at their leisure anytime via catch-up services. So as I observed in my earlier post, the actual day of initial broadcast now matters far less, and to far fewer listeners, than it did in my day.

Personally, I could see some sense in, and indeed welcomed, the coordination of around-the-globe release dates, as it brought about more equality across markets, and didn't make consumers in one country (usually the UK!) wait an extended time for their new favourite single releases to be made available to buy or stream legally. Yes, it helped bring an eventual end to the era of big-selling first-week singles, initially on CD and latterly on download, but given true sales were starting to dwindle as they were rapidly being cannibalised by streaming anyway, this seemed less of an issue than it might've been a few years prior to the date they chose to give effect to this initiative. What I didn't particularly understand was the choice of a Friday instead of say Monday as the global release date. AcerBen rightly observes above that this was partly to do with getting ahead of any pre-new-week/over-weekend leakages, especially of albums, but otherwise this didn't really chime with me in a largely post-physical, post-shop, not far-off post-sales era. It is true that companies weren't required to adhere to the new day, and while a good number do, in fact a single could be released for streaming on any day of the week, as it suits the artists and label concerned. So the concept of needing to shift the survey frame for the official charts away from the traditional Sunday-to-Saturday week (which broadly coincides with the actual Monday-to-Sunday calendar week around which most of our lives revolve, and so made much more intuitive sense than a 'split' frame across two different calendar weeks) to a Friday-to-Thursday model, just so that most new releases would have a whole seven days' sales/streaming action before their first chart position (if one is attained) is calculated, never really made sense to me. I think the ten years that have elapsed since 5th July 2015 have shown that sticking with the Sun-Sat status quo really wouldn't have been a negative thing, in an era where tracks move up and down the chart more organically (albeit a lot more slowly as a rule thanks to streaming's impact), and maximising the chart position first week out no longer has any real relevance or currency. Some of the biggest hits we now see may well open at No 1 or a similarly lofty position, but equally they may arrive very low-down and take months to realise their peak - some songs being marketed for months before even breaking the Top 100, depending on circumstances. As a longstanding chart follower and someone who's slightly anally-retentive about trying to keep things as consistent as possible in order to retain as much like-for-like comparability between what's happening now and what occurred in the same context in past decades, I also favoured the long-term adoption of Sun-Sat as it not only roughly aligned with actual calendrical weeks, but also a clear direct reference between one year and another, across what was five-and-a-half decades of recorded popular music and charting its relative commercial fortunes, albeit through a number of different formats and modes of consumption, and via numerous developments in the music itself and its creation. The dates - whether one used the survey week, chart use week, week-commencing or week-ending - would correspond. Suddenly switching to Fri-Thu meddled with that in a way someone like myself instinctively wouldn't like! The chart 'week' is now split across two 'real' weeks. I believe that while global release day had merit, the movement of chart weeks in the UK and US (and presumably several other countries) in 2015 was unmerited and unnecessary. While I do see it's important that we accept/tolerate that change, especially over one decade on from it, and adjust our chart dating system to accord with it, there's a part of me that still quite likes the fact that the US charts nevertheless adhere to the Billboard Saturday issuance date when referring to their charts (albeit that it sits two days after the week in which that chart's use expired on the Thursday)! I believe our very own UKChartsPlus publication also did likewise, if only for continuity and because I think it was easier for KingofSkiffle's database management, although no longer being a subscriber I can't say for sure if that is still the case. Finally, I completely concur with those who say they preferred the Sunday chart show arrangement. It's not merely nostalgia; it is just an obvious time slot in a week to air a show like a Top 40 countdown. And that's regardless of the dual realities that far fewer people are concerned with the weekly charts than in previous generations, and that those who still are can now hear the broadcast at any time to suit their personal convenience online. I hear the 'First Look' show far more than the actual week-end Friday Top 40 simply because it's a casual listen for me nowadays, and chances are I'll be lounging at home Sun pm listening to the radio, but out 'n' about Fri afternoon. All this is of course very-much a case of 'it is what it is' now, but if we could turn the charty clock backwards I'd like to have seen them decide to stick to the old model rather than adopt the new, even if they still insisted on Fri as the preferred day of the week on which to set the new release day standard.

It's ironic that where this was once a reasonably commonplace occurrence in the 2000s/'10s, nowadays it's far more likely that we'd see things the other way around - i.e. songs not officially issued as 'singles' still get into the charts. By this I mean those that are either heavily promoted through inclusion on a TV or film soundtrack, but which were never formally issued as a single per se (and never will be), or those which are already available on a parent album release, and while might be promoted as a single via radio, TV and online channels, actually can't be streamed or bought from a stand-alone single package as such (i.e. they can only be streamed or bought as a track from the album bundle). These scenarios occur increasingly commonly, what with Netflix shows suddenly catapulting older (sometimes non-single) songs into contemporary popularity, and the release of an album after issue of maybe two or three prequel singles, which I suppose renders it technically unnecessary to put any tracks from it that are later promoted as 'singles' out in a stand-alone single thereafter. An alternative strategy may be to issue a remixed/rerecorded edition of the original album version as a stand-alone single, while the original only remains available from the album. The one that always stands out in my memory as becoming ineligible for the charts was a song called 'Industry' by a band called The Modern, a sort of latter-day imitation of The Human League in style and sound. Issued on CD in March 2006, it was set for a Top 15 entry on release, but was rendered excludable at the last minute, I think owing to the OCC having detected what appeared to be some irregular and suspicious sales through certain stores, enough to justify not awarding it an official chart position. Quite a lot of singles were barred from charting due to known or strongly-suspected hyping attempts, as far back as the 1970s.

In truth I avoided posting any votes for Mariah and Wham! just because I assumed they'd outperform most other options, based on how they seem to do just that on the official charts nowadays. Sadly I fear that 'Christmas Wrapping' continues to miss out on a UK Top 40 placing just because it didn't manage one first or second time around in the early '80s. Had it been a bigger hit originally, it might've stood a better chance of sticking with people through the ensuing decades and thus perform better in current-day seasonal streaming tallies than it has (I also would guess being a tad more leftfield it isn't included on every preconceived playlist that many people passively rely on to play out a background of Christmassy hits). That said, it does seem to get a decent amount of airplay each Christmas, and so it seems that more recent generations have yet to fully take notice of it as they have done some other seasonal fodder which was released many years before their time

Surely we could cover a lot of individual examples here by just saying that any track that was never released officially as a 'single' per se (or only was after specific keen demand became apparent for the song following use in a popular TV or film vehicle etc) that went on to become a notable commercial/chart success qualifies as something which wasn't necessarily intended to be a 'hit', at least in its own right (so besides being a contributory factor to a parent album's popularity). Since the advent of the download era in particular we've seen innumerable examples of album-only non-singles go on to attain often quite prominent chart profiles, as it became possible to cherry-pick any song from a digital bundle regardless of whether it was (or later would be) released as a stand-alone single, and particularly once digital sales of all tracks not just those marketed as physical singles were permitted to become fully-chart-eligible. Lots of album tracks charted for just a week or two after the release of a hotly-tipped or eagerly-awaited artist's latest long-player (obvious examples include Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Adele and Drake); sometimes every song on the album made its own impression (at least until chart rules were introduced to cap the number allowed to appear on the official published version of the Top 100 to just three). However, a few did sustain lengthy chart careers in tandem with the track that actually had been given the single release. I think Alan Jones used to refer to these as 'halo hits' in his MW commentaries. Some obviously were clear future singles-in-the-making, and were eventually given their release in that format, but only after they'd already racked up a pretty impressive chart presence and sales tally as just an album track (the most memorable example to my mind was Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face', which charted when the album was released but didn't receive a proper single issue for three months while its predecessor 'Just Dance' was still working through its peak chart career). There are many more however that were never intended to be singles, and indeed were never issued as such officially, even after a growing chart presence, making these simply album cuts (or possibly B-sides in a few cases) which just sold/streamed well in their own right presumably with no expectation on the part of either the artist or label that they would do. Perhaps this just goes to demonstrate how formal releasing as a single has become less and less relevant to determining which songs become chart hits, or whether or not a certain track might end up doing very well. Promotion of a song - be that by the record label through the traditional media of radio and television, more recently via direct artist promos through their website or social media platform, the unexpected random usage of that title to soundtrack a very popular film or TV series, and/or adoption en masse by ordinary folk as a backing track for self-produced viral videos (TikTok etc) - has always been a notable factor in helping to determine whether it will become a commercial success. It's never been a dead-cert guarantee - there's been many flops despite great promos and media interest - but, even in the physical-only era, having your song on a film soundtrack, on an ad, as well as airing on radio and later TV, could really boost its chances in the charts, and often led to reissues of older songs as singles and them being bigger hits than they'd ever been. In the digital world, with access to so much more music including all catalogue acts as well as currently-active artists' product, inevitably these aspects, alongside being able to catch on and go viral either through deliberate attempts or by genuine accident, adds hugely to a song's potential fortunes. A number of tracks which have graced the 2020s charts were never singles originally or expected to be hits in their own right, but years later being picked up for a long-running and mass-binged TV series for example really did propel these hitherto-little-known recordings into major chart hit territory. And still they never actually became available, or were specifically promoted as, singles. Off the top of my head, Djo's 'End Of Beginning' I think fits these criteria.

Such an interesting exchange of views about the charts - mostly let's face it the singles rather than albums - which for all its perceived faults I'm grateful to this article for kick-starting. Yes, we've all read similar-sounding pieces of throwaway media before, and we've all entered into debates that inevitably ensue among music lovers as to how worthwhile, relevant, necessary or accurate the charts are, to both the modern consumer or industry insider, especially given the amount of massaging the official Top 100s have nowadays. But broadly, I think this one does capture the dilemma about charts quite effectively, both for those of us 'in the know' and the vast majority of its readers who are not, and the content that wrongly or rightly occupies them (which is always such a subjective matter and one which is seldom borne out by sales/streams tallies or weekly chart performance). One should dismiss all the indulgent journalese nonsense, but not necessarily the underlying supportable points that it actually seeks to underscore. For example, the over-exaggeration of what are perfectly valid points about occasional chart domination due to en-masse and often 'passive' streaming and the dwindling of traditional sales, as we've seen with Ed Sheeran on several occasions (in 2024 his chart white-outs might seem less prevalent, but after all, the man's the reason why we have the tiresome but arguably relevant rules now in play that manipulate chart rankings into something the industry would rather see, as opposed to the real but more stagnant reality), and the pseudo-vox-pop pap of citing two randoms from N Ireland's current take on music that do in fact lay out two worthwhile perspectives on the issue, if looked at in more generalised terms. I'm no 'Guardian' reader, but this is by far not their worst bit of copy on the topic we all share some interest in, however much we've fallen in or out of love with it and the music/artistry it represents; to my mind at least its positives outweigh its negatives. It is not the laziest (it at least cites the key distinctions that did affect its fortunes, such as the bungled iterative integration of download sales alongside those of physical singles, and later the hurried and fundamentally arbitrary combining of two entirely different modes of track consumption - sales and streams - both concisely and accurately) and does set out for the layman the general difference between what is classifiable as 'chart' music in the 2020s and what preceded it, hitting upon some very salient developments along that journey. Its text certainly doesn't anger me or make me feel as if it's not a wide-scale likely representation of how charts - and therefore what passes for 'popular' music - are perceived by different demographic cohorts now, as opposed to the simpler situations that perhaps prevailed in decades past when the concept of 'pop' - and of 'charts' - were newer, and still that bit more vital, individual, straightforward, and so relevant (though critically not necessarily more accurate as a barometer of what product was actually being most monetised). If I had the perfect balanced and sensible 'answer' to how to resolve the chart's inherent clash between wanting to mirror reality in market terms and needing to present a more 'rationalised' rundown which airbrushes out or paints-down the less-desirable by-products that integrating one form of consumption alongside another has caused, I'd be touting it far and wide and probably asking the OCC for a job! However, like most of us, I don't have that ideal solution; what's done is done, and in many ways I think things have gone too far now to rectify, almost irrespective of who really knows or cares about the faults. The charts will endure for many years to come, but I fear the wider public's indifference to them will only deepen too. And that's before we even start to debate the relative perceived merits of current acts and tracks, inevitably versus those of the past. What I find interesting - even amusing - is how individuals' own recollection of the music of their youth (good or bad by objective metrics) and the way the charts reflected this (right or wrong depending on validity of compilation methodology etc) seeps through into their comments on the way these things operate today. That's not to say any of those views herein expressed are 'incorrect' or even 'irrelevant'; far from it. Yet, while we all can see music and its measurements slightly differently, in general, it has to be said that many people tend towards seeing what prevailed in their childhood or adolescence as being somehow preferable to what rules now. Maybe that is often very arguable, but in a world where a lot rests on opinion rather than scientific fact, it doesn't insulate their viewpoints and ways in which they express these from easy pot-shots by those who disagree or don't recognise them who allege that they're merely donning the rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to this subject, and sadly that can in some eyes reduce credibility or validity of those narratives. That doesn't render them 'wrong'. But the fact is, however people of many different age groups might now reject or criticise the current charts, or the material that makes up their rather arbitrary positions, the truth is, they still care, even if it is because they believe fings ain't wot vey used t'be! They - we - hold a view that somehow what is current is lesser, and what was past (at least in selective parts) is greater. Thing is, if one could speak to any chart or music fan from the last six decades, they'd probably all proclaim likewise, to greater or lesser degrees. Someone might wish to make a note to bump this thread again in another ten, 20, 30 years, as its contents will almost certainly be just as relevant!

Don't normally bother to comment on these, especially when it's personal opinion involved, but really folks, Aitch and D-Block Europe - it's hard to imagine a worse combination of musically monotonous acts!

It would, of course, have excluded all but three tracks from new albums by one artist in any given week, which is the main reason ACR was introduced in the first place, to avoid total takeovers of single artists across the published chart, and especially in the upper echelons usually in the first week or so of release. Besides the most infamous occasion where this white-out happened with the release of Ed Sheeran's 'Divide' in March 2017, I note that Drake's number of Top 100 'hits' would have been vastly curtailed had ACR been in play during 2015 and '16, as all his brief album track entries bar three would've been starred-out. And although I fundamentally have to question the artificial manipulation of the chart presented to us as consumers - and so ACR doesn't sit well with me in principle - in practice, I must admit that this fact alone would've made me a happier man chart-wise! I'm fairly certain it would've limited the run of the inexplicably popular 'One Dance' too, albeit perhaps through one of those odd scenarios where the official chart-topper was actually neither the most sold or most streamed track of the prior seven days.

This really does depend on how one defines the term 'musician'. If it's a more casual, relaxed definition, then even those who aren't professional players, singers or producers could qualify, whether or not they've had just a one-off or more frequent dabblings with commercial success. But for the stricter, more precise end of the definition, it pretty-much rules out any individual who has not been either formally trained in instrumental or vocal capabilities, or otherwise become self-taught to a good standard. There is a school of musical thought and musicianship more widely which doesn't really recognise most of the 'pop' of the last 70 years as having any great musical qualities at all, because they always set it against classical composition and performance, which is of a very different and more complex format and so probably shouldn't bear comparison with what now passes for a four-minute popular song derived from the 'rock' foundations of the 1950s that speaks routinely about basic human emotions like love. But it's that simplicity, ease and brevity that renders that huge canon of similarly-derived work so appealing to the everyday listener, whereas classical stirs emotion and wonder but takes rather more brainspace and determination to fully appreciate it. It's not really fair to always compare these two very diverse forms of music. Saying that, the latter definition above would rule out a lot of acts who are by their own admission 'producers' who really just feel their way in music, have some ideas, and know how to operate machinery and utilise technology that wrongly or rightly allows them to express these, albeit often of an unoriginal or unsophisticated form. Or otherwise they're one-off chancers in the vocal booth - these days so readily assisted by auto-tune software. Innumerable chart successes have been born of this kind of 'DIY' ethic that people would associate initially with punk in that one needn't be a virtuoso player or singer, but in the decades since has been whittled down to include people who frankly still can't really play or sing live, but whose pre-recorded productions are enough to become viable hits. One has to query the true musicianship of some in that style. If however we just stick to the former, very broad definition, where anyone who's been involved with musical performance irrespective of training, experience, or even natural ability/talent, but who somehow ended up producing or contributing towards a meaningful hit or hits, then we may be far more generous and less exclusive about which acts qualify for the hall of fame. Alas, the charts have never been a useful or consistent barometer that measures the relative quality of composition or live performance, which has led to numerous songs (and acts) of little musical worth scoring high, and perhaps less comfortably, those of considerable quality instrumentally, lyrically and in overall production terms, failing to ever access the weekly rankings. Equally though there has been plenty of excellent stuff that has scaled the heights and a lot of crap that hasn't. I think that will always be the case.

Clearly, when one looks beyond the now-reduced-in-relevance metric of the weekly singles charts, and even beyond the increasingly-small albums equivalent, and takes into account wider internet appeal, success in live performances, sales of merchandise, support from other media such as radio and television, bands are not dead, or even dying. Granted, their profile on the current singles chart is more minimal than it probably ever has been in pop history, which is what's making observers feel as if the concept itself must be old-fashioned, increasingly irrelevant, or at worst on its death bed. But that trend is due in part to the wider reasons that explain why the now-dominant consumption method of music - streaming - tends to favour genres and acts that are not guitar/rock-based, and that consumers of the latter tend to be less-streaming-led and more sales-driven. And the majority of bands, whether they be pure guitar or more mixed in their sound, tend to fall into those categories, whereas those genres which (rightly or wrongly) tend to do well in streaming (and therefore in the singles sector) such as rap/hip-hop/drill etc and to a surprising extent dance, are more-often-than-not acts made up of a singular or perhaps dual-person production-based outfit, with varying vocal collaborators, which can't really be categorised as a 'band'. It is certainly true that these don't dominate in quite the same way in the albums market, which is less-streaming-influenced in overall numbers and reflects the more traditional sales-led market - that market is evidently steadily shrinking, but it is very responsive to one-week wonders where even a relatively modest fanbase of a fairly niche artist can briefly score very highly with a new long-player. And in that regard, it's clear bands still have considerable traction. They won't make anywhere near as much money from that source as they once did. But as I said earlier, there is the live performance and merch streams to consider, which are now probably bigger revenue sources even for small-time starter groups, as well as the longstanding big-time outfits (although the latter type will often have hugely successful back catalogues from the sales-dominated era and have such cross-generational familiarity that even their weekly streaming keeps delivering decent-enough dollar for them - hardly the case for new acts alas). As said above, we do probably need to free ourselves from the once-fairly-sound presumption that for a certain type of act, style, genre, whatever to be regarded as broadly successful in the commercial music markets, there'd need to have been at least a few prominent bona fide 'hits' on the singles side in order for us to legitimately consider them to be categorised that way. Even then, there have been scores of acts who were never commercially successful in single or album terms, yet live long in memories and hearts due to their particular context and cultural impact they had at the time of their creative peaks. But when measuring by commercial impact alone, some sort of singles success needed to be evidenced, even if there'd been only modest incursion into the albums charts. Now, in the age of mass-streaming across millions of different titles and artists, packaged over numerous different album, single and mini-album/EP bundles, clearly it's far more conceivable to have a very impactful success over many months/years on streaming and yet never achieve any great dents in the weekly tallies. It's true that most streaming is of the titles beneath the Top 100, and the proportion of the streaming total each week made up by those 100 is now vanishingly small. This isn't due to the three-track-per artists cap or ACR rules either - the 'real' combined Top 200 weekly tracks chart is even more clogged and slow-moving than the manipulated published variant and doesn't see songs from more niche genres score higher peaks - indeed they are far lower, as all the mass-streamed old hits are given a chart position and so squeeze down the lower-profile and newer releases even more. As this is now a far more meaningful measure of 'success' or of 'hit' status than in the sales era, it should now be given due prominence when properly assessing an act or a title's impact overall, or indeed the relevance of a certain style of music or configuration of artist. I concede that moving people away from the singles chart as the main means of ready measurement of 'success' or 'relevance' will be a tough ask, especially among casual listeners and older demographics for whom that has been the primary point of reference for discerning 'hits' all their lifetimes. But evidently if one is to offer a more sound commentary on this issue, one needs to look far less carefully at singles chart history (or lack of) and much more at the overall streaming tallies to date, and perhaps what the average typical streaming numbers look like over time, especially for those uncharted-yet-enduring songs. Personally, I have never logged-on to TikTok, and as a non-social media user in general I am perhaps instinctively somewhat suspicious of its increasing dominance in influencing younger consumers' musical listening choices, and the way it seems of late to be an almost essential element for a song if it is to achieve a more persuasive and long-term crossover success and make a profound impact on the singles charts. Yet I am bound to agree with someone who earlier on in this thread made the point that while the process can be somewhat random as to what gets picked up and made viral through the site, it does at least seem genre and act-agnostic when one looks at the surprising breadth of artists, types, and ages of song that it has helped propel towards the charts, which has surely assisted in creating a little more diversity of music in a singles scene that pre-TT was looking worrying stagnant, predictable, limited and repetitious. Alas I believe all those descriptions still apply to the chart each week, but sudden take-offs of any kind of song or act you could think of through TT, or in alignment with a big commercial TV production perhaps, that don't conform to the usual sort of dross that routinely makes the published charts, do help punctuate things, whether or not I personally like the titles in question. And it is through these means, if no other, that we can at least occasionally see bands as well as solo/duo/mixed collaborating acts get a chart berth. Thank God they aren't solely reliant any more on achieving that though, as there's no question it's harder for a new outfit of any sort to attain a singles chart profile without some kind of outside and often unplanned media/internet support - and yes, being a band or group rather than a solo act probably will make it harder-still. Like may on this thread, I really hope that with the passage of time, and inevitable shifts in the consumer market and the shape of the wider scene, this changes for the better. Where would we have been without those now-hugely-heralded bands of the past?

It is a phenomenal effort just in the copying, collating, typing and posting these original chart Gallup/BMRB reports, and it should be clear for those interested in these over on UKMix but don't know the history that it couldn't have happened without three key chartographers of our time - Robbie himself who does the posting, KingofSkiffle who does the collation and database elements, and most importantly Kobyhadrian, who originally obtained all the reports from the BPI and spent Lord-knows how many man hours typing them up into a presentable form! They have between them summoned up a very thorough and as accurate as is available database of panel sales activity across almost two decades' worth of singles chart history, and the quality and consistency of the results now being steadily made accessible to us all can't be underestimated. I'm keen that fellow chart travellers on BuzzJack are aware of this if ever they investigate these chart reports and make use of them. Yes, it still leaves us bereft of such detailed data for the three most recent decades since Millward Brown have been at the helm of official chart compilation, and of course the pre-1976 era when popular music as we know it truly established itself. But we've got to be grateful for what we get, and tolerate the reality that there'll almost certainly always be significant gaps where there is far less data, or none at all, accessible to us. Anything like exact weekly or monthly panel sales reports from the latter period probably no longer exist and the further one goes back, the less accurate any data becomes; as to the former, there will be much accurate and useful sales information stored, but unless we ever have the luxury of someone posting Millward Brown original reports, or somebody gets rare (and ludicrously expensive!) access to the OCC's database, one has to doubt that those decades will ever be covered in the same depth chart-wise as the 1976-'94 canon. So we're lucky even to now have that.

A fascinating topic I've only just caught up with, and one which underlines why I've never quite embraced streaming in the way I'd have perhaps liked - i.e. because there'd eventually always be annoying gaps that may never get filled, regardless of the genre, era or other basis on which one might compile playlists. I compiled best-selling singles Top 100s for the 2010s, 2000s, 1990s and 1980s, and managed to fill most positions for each decade, but there were some obvious missing hits and yes, mostly from the charity world, which I suppose one can understand. It's the regular songs that are missing that are oddities - or worse-still those which apparently have featured on Spotify but no longer do, for no obvious reason. Perhaps even more disappointing is thinking you've found what you need for a playlist, only to find it's the wrong version (so not the standard 7" mix usually played by radio/TV). I find my local pub jukebox does this and we all need to be very careful if using it to try and triple-check that the version you're picking isn't some 12" mix, album version, live version, remix or rerecording - even with the greatest care one can still get it wrong and waste 15p! No idea what the new streaming arrival is but however awful some of these songs are, they should nevertheless be accessible, to satisfy things like 'greatest hits' playlists, and to ensure the format is considered credible and inclusive of almost all well-known songs ever recorded.

I'm still idly wondering how many of the 712 viewers of this thread readily swallowed it?! ;)

What I didn't initially understand about this particular streams-based retrospective rundown was why it excluded the 2000s and 2010s, and also for that matter (arguably more outlandishly) the 1960s or even 1950s. But then the penny dropped that it was compiled entirely for Greatest Hits Radio who only play music from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, so clearly it was a very specialised list which they insisted stuck to their playlisting criteria. I still think Christmas or other seasonal/speciality songs should've been included though, even for a chart that's only narrowed to a particular thirty-year period of the past. Whatever the arguments as to how many would've charted inside this Top 300 and how high, one must suspect that at least a few would've amassed sufficient online listens in the streaming era (so presumably if OCC compiled this we're talking just over the last ten years to January 2014 when streaming data begins to officially be counted, albeit we know they compiled streaming data for over 18 months prior to that as they used to publish a weekly Top 40 streaming chart) to have registered here and there across the chart. Provided they weren't maxing-out the Top 10 or 20, and there weren't too many positions taken up with tunes that would sound bizarre and unwelcome if played across a regular Easter weekend in March, surely they could just have skipped over them, i.e. announce the song and the position it occupied, then explaining for obvious reasons it doesn't feel appropriate to play it now, and move on to the next entry which carries more universal appeal to their audience. Instead, they broadcast a chart that might've had some use and relevance as a gauge of what is enduringly popular from the last three decades of the 20th century via streaming, but as-is, was subject to arbitrary exclusions of certain types of song, and so carries far less gravitas, at least to the purist. Then again, as it's OCC, we should know by now that of course any chart they're allowing to be broadcast will've been subject to manipulation!!

One thing I have been told by someone who is similarly interested in seeing the real-world singles charts, but unlike most of us has had the benefit of actually seeing a few over the years, is that the lack of exclusions of en-masse-streamed new album tracks through the three-track-per-artist cap, and the forcing downwards of many older hits and artificial uplifts of newer ones via ACR, the real Top 200 chart does get very clogged up with short-lived non-singles, and ageing but still-regularly-playlisted titles hang around even longer than they do on the manipulated version of the rankings. I appreciate that this is an obvious observation anyone could guess at, knowing the nature of the Jul '17 rules and reasons for their introduction. But the point is, having seen a selection of Top 200s since, he reminded me that they are in fact mostly very stagnant, and suffer from the sudden oddities of LP tracks making huge but brief impacts - they are not mirrors of the sort of Top 200s we enjoyed in the 'pure' sales-only era when all formats were eligible (Jan '07 to Jun '14), where there was a more reasonable mix of chart behaviours and movements that created more diversity and therefore more interest, but without too many extreme odd outliers that made it look disproportionate (such as those which streaming being included has created). Those songs you'd found making some impacts for a week or more in those 101-200 positions on sales only in the pre-streaming period almost certainly now won't be able to make enough of an impact to appear in the equivalent ranks now, as so many millions of listens are now needed to reach even the unadjusted position of 200, and with actual paid sales contributing so little to most tracks' chart traction. Indeed, I think it was Alan Jones who reported recently that the amount of total weekly streams that are made up the Top 75 official chart titles are "vanishingly small", as inevitably so many of people's listens are derived from a vaster-than-ever catalogue of music past and present, meaning that only a few handfuls of titles garner enough to accrue streams into the six or seven-figure realms in seven days, with most of the 25 million-or so listens/watches online each chart week are divided up between millions of songs attaining just two, three, four-figure tallies, which can never chart, even under the current rules. So my point here is that it would likely be a disappointment for those expecting to see more of their preferred singles getting a chart position at least on the 'real' Top 200 - the reality nowadays is that they are LESS likely to achieve it there than on the manipulated published chart - and that would still be the case even if they'd elected to retain that listing as a 200 rather than truncate it to just the 100 berths. That won't of us course dampen enthusiasm for seeing the true Top 200s based on actual most-consumed titles in a week if one's main motivation is not to see more of one's own liked songs get a chart profile, but rather just to see what the real weekly positions (and peaks) of every title are, free of restrictive and misleading arbitrary eligibility rules. But right now, I think the chances of getting that information, either retrospectively or from some point in future, are sadly somewhere between 'fat' and 'no'!

I have thought further about this and have decided that for now the manipulated published chart must (and in all reality probably will) remain as-is, for all its faults, but ideally, someone somewhere should start obtaining the 'real' Top 200 tracks charts from OCC dating back to July 2017 and leak them to us!

I'd say anything that reaches the published official Top 100 chart, for all its current faults and shortcomings. But not everybody is aware of or bothers to engage with the fuller charts, especially nowadays, so of course many will now disagree. Obviously I am basing my opinion on the presumption that we just consider the term 'hit' to relate to charts and peak positions, which inevitably only tell a partial picture, and as others have noted, increasingly-so in an era of enduring streams over time which may not always translate into a significant chart profile for a track in any given week, but over time amass a relatively impressive to-date tally that in the sales-only era no track attaining such modest chart peaks would ever be likely to achieve, even in the digital period when tracks became available indefinitely as a catalogue product (as opposed to their physical counterparts whose sales power was finite thanks to stocks expiring or deletion). Clearly overall sales, or streams for titles released more recently, carry a significant role in measuring whether or not they were a 'bona fide' hit, as these screen-out the one-week wonders that may have charted high due to an event or a charitable cause, but don't endure and ultimately don't accrue bigger numbers in either sector of consumption. The context of a short-term big streams or sales splash should always be borne in mind when deciding whether a high-charting record should really be determined a 'proper' hit. One could develop the concept further and start measuring other types of a song's impact and achievement, say by numbers of followers online, usage in TV/movies, reception at live performances, radio play and so on, which can help determine the wider cultural impact a song may have in time. But for me that is a slightly different evaluation and it's easier, and I suspect more commonly understood, if we refrain from expanding what constitutes a 'hit' too widely and restrict it to the song's commercial performance - as reflected by overall streaming and sales tallies, and to an extent weekly chart peaks and longevity in the published charts which people en masse can access. If we do so, the greater number of people will have a more easily-defined and consistent notion of what can be classified as true hit material and what should not be. I don't have any empirical evidence, but I do suspect that most casual music lovers would likely still define the term very simply, i.e. whether a song attained a position on the main chart - even if it's just for a week and due to a very specific impetus rather than a more long-lived organic success. The only variable would be the size of the chart which people would feel represents a genuine hit over a miss - so some would say Top 10, 20, maybe 40, as these remain the most publicised and talked-about echelons of the weekly rankings.

Well, I did start by making acknowledgement that people will disagree with me, and that the two consumption modes shouldn't be seen as competing with each other - and the last two posters have gone along with that! It is of course reality that the industry wanted a singular combined chart, and nobody was surprised when they rushed headlong into creating one, after the three-year farce that was the dilution of digital with physical sales (and they were at least still based on a single paid-for purchase, with only the purchasing mode, pricing and environment differing). And of course it is true that some titles max-out in both sectors; there have been plenty of streaming No 1s which were also sales No 1s in the last decade. That's good to see when it happens, as it does still impart a sense of a really genuine, authentic number one hit, even in a market where actual sales are of relatively little consequence and streaming is in charge. But for slightly older music and chart fans, it's hard to shake off the full 62 years of chart history before 2014 where we only recognised recorded music success through the medium of sales, and so for us it still feels like it should retain some importance. The weirdest situation that the post-new-rules world has imposed on us though is every now and then we get a chart-topper on the combined, 'sanitised' published Top 100 that is neither the preceding seven days' most-streamed or sold title!! As far as I can recollect it's maybe only occurred about five or six times since July 2017, but when word gets out about it it can only undermine the chart even further, and make even the more casual observer of it query what the hell it is supposed to be measuring if neither the streaming or sales chart-topper matches the one on the official version.

While many will disagree, if only because there has to be some acknowledgement that in the 'real world' neither industry nor consumer would really have supported two 'rival' charts being co-published each week, but the simplest and I think fairest solution would indeed have been to just keep both charts alive, and for a suitable moment to be chosen - possibly just the beginning of a new calendar year if no other break-point presented itself - to 'flip' the mantle of the 'official charts' from the sales-only to streaming-only ranking, so that the latter became the chart of record in recognition of the almost complete dominance of streams in the music marketplace and precipitous decline of sales, at least in respect of single tracks (perhaps less so albums although it's catching up and sales are still dwindling). Just think of it - by the 2020s, we could've just had a streaming chart - 200 published positions long potentially - ranked simply and purely on how many listens/views each title had had that week. Granted, there'd remain the debate as to the relative value of a searched-for a la carte stream as opposed to a passive pre-conceived playlisted one, but it would at the least be a cleaner way to measure current consumption, with the old sales-based ranks demoted into a secondary, but still available, and to some of course, still relevant, role as the supporting act to the new top of the bill. I completely agree with T-Boy and always have that with streaming being such a different and distinct mode of consumption compared to its sales predecessors, splicing the two together was inevitably a recipe for a bad marriage, and has resulted in an increasingly manipulated - and therefore many would say meaningless - official chart, as streaming cannibalises most of what's left of the sales market and arbitrary rules have been ushered in to try and offset the perceived inconvenient and bizarre-looking fall-out on chart behaviour. As to broadcasting, I quite the idea too of Radio 1 doing the streaming chart and Radio 2 the sales one - and ideally re-setting the chart frame back to its more recognisable and conventional alignment with the calendar week. But as we know folks, both industry and to an extent consumer expect a 'single source of truth' for the charts nowadays, and so it was always going to be a tough sell to persuade the powers that be to keep faith with two separate charts, which they'd always insist would be pitched as 'rivals', even though they are in fact nothing of the sort. And if the streaming option had at one point been officially determined as the 'official' chart of historical record, what real harm would there have been to have led with a 'two horses' solution? As it is though, we took the 'Billboard' style route and, while ours aren't as heavily-bogged down as the American charts in arcane and ever-altering rules, we have ended up with a needlessly complicated and artificial jumble of caveats and constraints designed to tackle persistent passive streaming that creates stagnation in the real rankings, conversions to pointless sales 'equivalents', en-masse streams of all tracks on a major artist's latest album release wiping-out the Top 10/20 in a single week, the problem of determining where an oldie must be 're-set' to allow its true renewed chart potential come through... Two charts running parallel for a few years while the transition was made from one form of consumption to another surely could've been less complicated, less damaging, less messy than what transpired adopting the 'let's combine the two as quickly as possible and make it up from there' approach! After all this waffle I've singularly failed to actually answer the original question posed here, which was 'what shall we do with the failing singles chart we now have?'; not 'what should we have done with it a decade or less ago?'. My feeling for what it's worth is that the damage has been done now; we can't go back and revise chart positions on cleaner, more separate rankings, any more than we can turn back the clock and fix the half-arsed transition from physical to digital, the late adoption of various physical formats into the chart, adjustment of dealer pricing, disposing of artificial exclusion rules that applies to various echelons of the chart at different times, or collect more accurate sales data for the pre-computer era. So perhaps we - or rather the OCC and wider industry in charge of the charts - should just sit it out and wait and see, and only look to meddle further when the need is especially strong? At least they have managed to stick to essentially the same rules for almost six years now, instead of the regular chopping and changing seen in the initial years of the awkward juxtaposition of sales and streams. We may disagree or dislike it, but we know where we stand. It's probably too late to just flip over to a streaming-only chart, as it's clear that covering all relevant forms of direct consumption of recorded music is the way forward for an official chart, including even the more niche parts of the market like sales (and within that category, sales of cassettes or USB sticks). Okay, the final positions churned out each Friday evening aren't what you'd call 'real', but at least we can know that all data from all sectors has been recorded, and - albeit never to be seen by us mere music-loving mortals as it could threaten what credibility remains of the artificial; sorry official, chart - we know that behind the scenes a 'real' chart is compiled. The 'Top 200 tracks' chart exists, if only in some OCC database. Anyone feeling hopeless in their quest for unfailing accuracy in logging combined chart impact can take some modest comfort from recognising that - to quote the old 'X Files' cliche - the truth is out there!! But like so many things in modern life, we just don't get access to it. Yet who knows? Maybe in decades' time someone will obtain and publish those true charts and those who still give a hoot will be able to see what the actual picture each week should've looked like.

Clearly, it's overkill in terms of recognition, as many have already discussed above. And to backdate would be ludicrous given the number of Top 10 hits there've been, even just in this century! But I do concur that it's likely a good call for both the OCC, labels and artists. The former are looking for extra revenue and promotion, while the latter two are seeking the same, plus further public recognition of any vaguely-notable career achievements, and even in this era of virtually no real paid-for sales, passive streaming from pre-conceived playlists, and a manipulated chart to artificially lessen the effects of streaming en-masse over very long periods or just in a week or two of all a new album's tracks, securing an 'official' Top 10 chart position is still worth shouting about if you're an artist or the team helping them. OCC wouldn't be daft enough to spend money on manufacturing these additional awards if they didn't perceive there to be some greater reward for them down the line, and wouldn't have done it without industry input confirming there'd be support for the scheme. It's likely also seen as something that could help to do the job that the charts used to do when they were more popular, via the Top 40 show and Top Of The Pops, which was to give some extra profile to current hits. In an internet-led era with so many music feeds vying for people's attention, presenting a weekly chart alone (especially as has been pointed out, one that is so slow-moving and stagnant) doesn't cut through, so any additional emphasis that can be given to acts' achievements on it will be welcomed by all involved. Indeed, one of the founding purposes of the OCC is to find innovative ways of furthering awareness of their charts and it's their duty to keep focused on that. The Top Ten award is presumably just the latest attempt - however lame some of us might consider it to be and however little the bestowing of such awards may register with us. As observed earlier, at least we can be satisfied that this is being launched in a period of much steadier Top 10 activity than we've seen at times in the past. Launching this initiative any time between 1995 and 2005 would've made a mockery of it, and done the complete reverse of its aim of promoting a Top 10 chart position as an 'achievement', as so many singles were during that era able to attain it just through front-loaded promo campaigns and strong fanbase support, often only managing week 1 in the upper reach before disappearing downwards often without a majority of music lovers or radio listeners even having heard the song! Awarding such a fleeting and frequent event would've been laughable, discredited the charts even further, and cost them a fortune in manufacturing costs for the innumerable awards they'd have needed to present!

It's an interesting question. But, like so many chart phenomena, it isn't always easy to identify future behaviour of certain tracks or acts, even in the shorter let alone longer term. Indeed, it's usually quite the reverse, with some things panning out in a polar opposite way to how one might have predicted based on prior performance or wider trends. I think it fair to say that even with the artificial expedition of declines downwards due to the ACR rule, it was fairly obvious a bet that the likes of 'Anti-Hero' and 'As It Was' would linger very much longer in the official 100 beyond their initial 2022 showings, if only because of their mega success as keenly-awaited lead singles by major artists and their obvious cross-appeal musically and radio/TV-friendliness. But who really saw 'Calm Down' coming?! No offence to this pleasant-enough little Afrobeats ditty, but given the artist had no prior profile as such and the song was not an eagerly-anticipated release, it's harder to pin down why it's become so enduringly successful. Okay, it was given the 'add famous name' treatment earlier this year when they issued an alternative vocal version with Selena Gomez, which doubtless boosted its streaming fortunes somewhat. Yet that alone doesn't seem to properly-explain why this song which came from nowhere has made such lasting impact. Perhaps it did well on TikTok - being an old luddite I can't comment on that side of things and so often now it is found to be behind the sudden success of a hitherto unknown song/act or the seemingly random revival of an established former hit. That isn't always the reason though. I guess this is nothing new - througout our chart history, sometimes unknowns and un-obvious songs have crept up from little promise and end up just somehow capturing the moment and in the streaming-led world, stick like glue to playlists. If only we knew a more certain formula to this we'd all be down the studio churning out year-long hit records!

Second Image - funk/pop band from the eighties. Plenty of sub-40 action but nothing there or higher I don't think.