Robbie

What ratio would you suggest though? Plus would that just be curated playlists chosen by someone at Spotify (for example), or a playlist made by another Spotify user, or a playlist someone has made which they may want to listen to for an hour or two without constantly needing to choose the next track to listen to? I use all three ways of listening to Spotify as well as choosing individual tracks on an ad-hoc basis.

'You Make My Dreams' was one of their worst songs in the period 1980 to 1985 when they finally found some success in the UK. It never charted in 1981, not only on the main UK Top 75 chart but also didn't chart (or at least I can't find it) on the rival Record Business chart which was a top 120 at the time (a top 100 plus 20 Breakers). I can vaguely remember hearing it on Radio 1 back then but it was a long forgotten song even by me by the time it found success in the digital age. It will be ridiculous that a track that has never made the top 100 is a chart million seller. I thought it was ridiculous when 'The Chain' by Fleetwood Mac passed a million a few weeks ago but at least that song, or at least a part of it, is well known. That track has peaked at number 81 with 5 weeks inside the top 100 over an 8 year period from 2009 to 2017.

The defining moment to me of the decade was when Ed Sheeran held most of the top 20 positions one week back in 2017. It changed forever how the charts were compiled. It led to total artificiality as the compilers sought more ways to change the nature of the charts. First was "three songs per main act". Once that was introduced it led to a number of other changes, including the introduction of ACR. Which in turn led to the most bizarre situation where Ed Sheeran was number 1... but the song was removed from the chart due to a combination of the "three tracks per artist" rule and ACR. In July 2019 'I Don't Care' had moved to ACR and in one week was the fourth highest positioned track by Ed. Yet had it not been for ACR it would have been number 1. And therefore would have not been the fourth placed song by Ed. Instead it dropped completely from the charts, from number 3 the previous week, only to re-enter at number 3 the next week. It turned the charts into a total farce.

The premium price is down to supply and demand I think. There's only a limited amount of pressing plants in Europe that can do vinyl and many of them are working at full capacity. So the manufacturers can charge more. Plus the vinyl these days is of much better quality than it was when you and I would have bought albums. I remember buying some of those K-Tel albums where the vinyl was so thin it would almost wobble! Now they vinyl is of much higher quality. Plus of course, as vinyl is more of niche product there's a significant mark-up on the price at all points of the manufacturing, distribution and retailing chain.

'River' is part of an "Amazon Original" Christmas songs project https://musically.com/2019/11/14/amazon-to-...hristmas-songs/ I'm assuming Amazon will have let labels, managers etc know through some sort of press release about the project and asked for acts to take part. I doubt Amazon would have randomly contacted the acts who have been part of the project.

Yup. All of their releases seem to be from earlier this decade when record labels were holding back tracks. Their Christmas album is from 2011.

Jukebox Heaven have been releasing covers of popular hits for over a decade. They are an anonymous collection of studio musicians who have recorded dozens of tracks including an entire album of Christmas songs, including 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' as linked to above. Their covers remind me somewhat of those old Top Of The Pops albums that were popular in the 1970s amd 1980s which were cheap remakes of hits of the day. Their take on 'Fairytale Of New York' is a work of art. "Shane" and "Kirsty" can't even sing in time with each other! https://open.spotify.com/track/4mEEm8mUEFa8...sScSH6EhUUrhZXg The whole album... https://open.spotify.com/album/7eYUjZIAb2CA...MShaSeDUlS3Aujw As for a video by them for 'All I Want For Christmas Is You', well it looks like one doesn't exist. Or if it does it's well hidden which makes me wonder how many thousands of people managed to find it.

The Chartfreaks-UK Yahoo group? If so, and you still have the same email address if you click on https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo you'll be able to see what groups you are subscribed to.

My guess for the top 5: 1 Stormzy 2 Mariah Carey 3 Wham! 4 Lewis Capaldi 5 Ellie Goulding or possibly Dua Lipa The Stormzy track is awful and as I've posted before Lewis Capaldi has an awful voice. I went for Ellie or Dua at number 5 as it's hard to predict how Ellie is doing due to streams from sites other than Amazon having a 24 hour delay which helps boost Ellie at the start of the week. Speaking of the 24 hour delay I've read that Spotify etc all report on the morning of the daily updates (usually by 8am) but anything submitted later than not long after midnight cannot be used for that day. Why don't the OCC just produce a later update? It would make the updates and the final Friday chart more accurate.

The good thing about the Chartfreaks-UK group is that a number of the posts were copy and paste jobs of things like midweeks and weekly charts. And not just from the likes of BuzzJack, Haven and CHCMedia (I think that was the name of the site) but also Dotmusic up to 2003. So we can now view posts that I had thought were lost forever. For example, here's the midweeks chart thread from Christmas week 2003: 17/12/2003 Sales update to include Tuesday's sales... Singles 1: The Darkness - 77,457 2: Gary Jules - 74,147 3: Ozzy & Kelly Osbourne - 45,626 4: Bo Selecta - 34,122 5: The Idols - 28,835 8: Blue/Stevie Wonder/Angie Stone - 10,282 9: Atomic Kitten - 10,116 Albums: Will Young - 87,936 Dido - 85,100 MJ - 75,767 Black Eye Peas - 52,892 R.E.M. - 48,831 19/12/2003 1 NEW DARKNESS 132690 2 NEW MICHAEL ANDREWS FT GARY JULES 129685 3 1 OZZY & KELLY OSBOURNE 81059 4 NEW BO SELECTA 57580 5 NEW IDOLS 48372 6 2 WILL YOUNG 40170 7 3 BLACK EYED PEAS 29639 8 NEW ATOMIC KITTEN 17380 9 NEW BLUE FT STEVIE WONDER 17260 10 4 SHANE RICHIE 17066 11 NEW SUGABABES 16916 12 5 CLIFF RICHARD 13040 13 NEW ULTRABEAT 12130 14 6 WESTLIFE 9925 15 10 CHEEKY GIRLS 8852 16 14 KATIE MELUA 8654 17 7 EVANESCENCE 8508 18 22 OUTKAST 8454 19 17 UB40/UNITED COLOURS OF SOUND 8245 20 12 GIRLS ALOUD 7875 21 16 SIMPLY RED 7564 22 9 CHRISTINA AGUILERA 7534 23 8 GARETH GATES 6915 24 NEW FAST FOOD ROCKERS 6770 25 NEW BILLY MACK 6576 26 18 KEVIN LYTTLE 6480 27 13 NELLY FURTADO 5566 28 21 LOST BROTHERS FT G TOM MAC 5095 29 11 MADONNA 5040 30 23 BUSTED 4838 31 24 FATMAN SCOOP/CROOKLYN CLAN 4754 32 NEW G UNIT 4610 33 20 DIDO 4565 34 19 ALICIA KEYS 4548 35 15 BIG BROVAZ 4486 36 25 D-SIDE 4315 37 NEW ERIN ROCHA 4180 38 29 NODDY 3811 39 28 LEMAR 3273 40 27 JA RULE 3077 41 30 BRITNEY SPEARS FT MADONNA 2678 42 31 ALEX PARKS 2636 43 NEW BASIL BRUSH FT INDIA BEAU 2482 44 36 JAMELIA 2439 45 NEW JOE STRUMMER & THE MESCALEROS 2282 46 26 RACHEL STEVENS 2197 47 NEW TRAVIS 1954 48 32 JAY-Z 1912 49 33 JOHN & YOKO/PLASTIC ONO BAND 1834 50 39 DELTA GOODREM 1598 21/12/2003 From Music Week Website SINGLES Mad World 227,500 Christmas Time 222,500 Changes 144,800 ALBUMS Dido 270,000 Will Young 239,000 Michael Jackson 222,000 Darkness 90,000 From TOTP Website The Darkness led on Saturday morning by just 889 sales. Saturday ONLY sales looked like this Mad World sold 57,456 Christmas Time sold 51,481 By the end, 'Mad World' outsold The Darkness by 4,986 sales! This weeks sale for the Darkness has out-sold their previous single 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love' total sales by 50,000! *********************************************************************************************** It's like a nostalgia fest looking at some of those old posts! It's also unbelievable to think that it's nearly 16 years since Dotmusic closed. Where has the time gone?

I thought there was a thread about this but if there is I can't find it. As you may be aware, Yahoo have decided to pull the plug on all the Yahoo Groups that it hosts. They aren't as popular now but at one time they were an alternative to websites where people could post messages. One such group is Chartfreaks-UK. The group has been pretty much dead for a few years and I'd more or less forgotten I was a member until Yahoo sent me an email about the groups closing. The admin of the group is our very own polyhex and he has made the content available to download in a thread at UKMix:

To November 2002 Slade had sold 1,007,500 and Band Aid were on 3,550,000. Most of those would also be pre-1994 sales (pre OCC sales) since I don't think either single was given a physical re-release from 1994 to 2002. So that would make Slade on 1.792m and Band Aid about 4.5m in total. The original Band Aid track was also on 'Do They Know It's Christmas' by Band Aid 20 (it's track 2) and that sold just over a million so unofficially the original Band Aid single has sold over 5.5m copies.

Spotify Premium and with no plans to change it. I do have Amazon Prime at the moment, which includes Amazon Music (though not Amazon Music Unlimited). However I'm subscribed to Prime for this month simply for the Premier League football they are showing during December. Once the month is up I'll be cancelling my subscription.

I went for 11 weeks as I can't see any other track challenging it before it goes to ACR and drops to the bottom part of the top 10. Mariah is the likely replacement and had AIWFCIY not been on ACR it would most likely be at number 2 today and number 1 (and a clear leader too) next Friday. Instead I think Mariah will have to wait until a fortnight today to get the (Christmas) number 1.

It's good value at 50% off, Shame Music Week couldn't rerun the promotion they did three years ago. £1 a month for 6 months and then the regular montly subscription rate for the next 6 months. That was a bargain. It's possible you might be able to pay monthly. I started off with a full year's subscription in 2004 but phoned up just as the year was up and was able to pay a monthly subscription. Although the subscription company is now a different one it might be possible to still subscribe monthly which for the full package would work out at £10.38. For the digital or print package it would be £7.46 a month. It may be worth giving the subscription company a call or even contact one of the staff at Music Week. I've emailed a few of them (including the Editor) in the past when I had queries and all were very helpful. And a sale is a sale, I doubt they'd turn it down even if it takes a bit longer to set up monthly payments by Direct Debit rather than a one off card payment.

Some extra sales information taken from the current (02/12/19) issue of Music Week which might help with overall sales. Lewis Capaldi - Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent 522,358 Frozen 2 Soundtrack 15,791 (including streams*) The Greatest Shownman OST 2,125,003 Mamma Mia 2 OST 487,417 Moana OST 328,160 * there has been a change in the Compilation Albums chart rules to register streams where the album is the repertoire source

The magazine is very much focussed on the music business itself though there is still enough there to interest music fans. The latest issue of the magazine, out today, is good as it's the 60th anniversary of the launch of Music Week (then called Record Retailer until Billboard magazine bought the publication along with Record Mirror and changed the name to Music Week in 1971). Good going for a magazine that almost closed in 2012 and would have if a buyer had not been found as then owner UBM decided to cut its losses as the magazine was losing too much money. Now it's back in profit and sales are back up after many years of seemingly being in terminal decline (think back to the 70s, 80s and 90s when every record shop used to display the chart pages pull out, once the Singles chart became a fast moving joke in the mid 90s shops stopped displaying the chart and therefore stopped buying the magazine).

I edited my post just above Vidcapper's as I had similar sales to what vidcapper had but thought there must have been a mistake (for example 'Dance Monkey' is above 'Bruises on the year to date chart but overall has sold less). I'd forgotten that 'Bruises' dates back to 2017 and that the week the track first charted, back in February 2019 (at number 95) it had already sold just over 200,000.

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'Tutti Frutti' by Little Richard was the B side to 'Long Tall Sally' which was at number 17 the week the former had its one week on the charts. 'Long Tall Sally' eventually climbed to number 3.

It would make more sense to have a Top 100 of the Decade on NYE or NYD. I'm trying to think what happened back in 2009. I'm sure there was a decade end top 100 countdown but I can't remember when it was on. Was that NYE?

Yes, it's that time of year again... Radio 1 may at some point this week be announcng their scehdules for Christmas and the New Year. At the moment the published schedules for Radio 1 go up to Friday 20 December - there's a 4 hour Decade Of Dance special hosted by Pete Tong and Annie Mac following the Christmas top 40 and Scott Mills' Party Anthems - but there is a BBC press release due this week with the festive line-up for all its TV and radio stations. I'm assuming that there will be no full top 40 countdown on Friday 27 December. Perhaps just a quick rundown of the new top 40 and then playing the number 1. I wonder if we'll get two chart specials this year? A Top 40 of 2019 and a top 100 of the decade? However the 2019 chart year should end on Thursday 2 January 2020 which would mean that any end of year / decade chart that Radio 1 broadcasts would be missing a week's worth of sales. Possibly the OCC may decide to make Thursday 26 December the cut-off point for the 2019 chart year but that would mean 5 days worth of sales in 2019 would fall into the 2020 chart year.

There's been no update and it's possible (perhaps likely?) that it will not happen. The chart rule requires the label to ask for a manual reset while the track in question is outside the top 100 but in practice this seems to be ignored. If AIWFCIY was to get a manual reset I guess it would take effect from either this week or next Friday at the latest as once the track is inside the top 40 I can't envisage any "exceptional circumstances" that would meet the rule. The rule also requires a track to be "scheduled for promotion" but given the track is a Christmas song it will be promoted enough by radio and streaming playlists in the next few weeks. I doubt the record label have had to make any effort to schedule it for promotion though it could be argued the track is helping to promote the 25th anniversary release of 'Merry Christmas'.

SkyBet update 23/11/19@22:30 Lewis Capaldi - 4/1 Robbie Williams - 4/1 James Blunt - 6/1 Robbie Williams and Tyson Fury - 6/1 Stormzy - 6/1 WHAM - 6/1 Megan McKenna - 8/1 Chris Kamara - 9/1 Mariah Carey - 10/1

Sales SINGLES 55,000 Busted 48,751 Britney / Madonna 22,000 Kylie (4) 20,500 Outkast (6) 13,000 Ronan (9) 4,700 Mel C (27) 4,500 Linus Loves (31) 1,200 Boysterous (53) 1,200 Plastic Boy Ft Rozalla (55) 832 The Hazzards (67) 799 Seal (68) ALBUMS 83,604 Dido 70,000 REM Yes, that's as much sales information as would normally be given back then. The above is a copy and paste of what was posted in the weekly sales thread in the Dotmusic Chart forum.