BillyH

Viral in a much more traditional sense in that it got a lot of TV play and people talked about it in real life. Not too far off though, it was in December 1999 the first major hit based on an internet fad got released.

The gap between 'I'm Not The Only One' and 'Real Love' is so short I genuinely thought they were the same song for a while :blush: I was thinking, wow, this Sam Smith song is kinda long and epic. The piano riff in Real Love is majorly similar to You Ruin Me too, had that been the third track in order I'd be wondering what multi-artist masterpiece of a song I was listening to...

NOW Management: Jenny, we need another compilation by tonight - 'The Very Best of Now Dance', ok? Jenny Fisher: Great! So, right, that's N-Trance, Underworld, Darude... NOW Management: Ah, no, see it's for a younger 'youth' audience. Nothing before 2009. Jenny Fisher: No probs, Swedish House Mafia/Disclosure/Avicii etc right? NOW Management: Well, yeah...but it's got to appeal to really young teens too, ones who can't actually go to clubs yet. So we need some proper poppy stuff too. Jenny Fisher: Like? NOW Management: Well, you know, like...Cheryl Cole? And, erm...Ellie Goulding, Kelly Clarkson, those sort of acts. Make them about half the album. Jenny Fisher: Wait, did you say half the... NOW Management: Oh yeah, we need to be proper diverse, yeah? So we need some rap, R&B, put John Legend on there, he's huge with the kids right now. What's that big song of his? Jenny Fisher: ....All Of Me? NOW Management: Yep. Definitely put that on there. Jenny Fisher: It's a slow piano ballad. NOW Management: Really? Crap. Find a remix of it or something. Jenny Fisher: Ok, sorry, we seriously need to change the name of this then because this clearly isn't the Very Best of anything, the music forums are gonna go nuts... NOW Management: Look, we can argue forever about this, but it has to be at the manufacturing plant by tonight, we've got three more to do before Christmas, just hurry things up, ok? And don't forget All About That Bass! Jenny Fisher: Sigh. Ashley Abram: LOL, I retired at the right time...

Pretty much every major hit of the 1980s, although most have been copied from compilation CDs/tapes/vinyl rather than actually downloaded.

Just in case anyone still wants tickets, the O2 website still have some available for both London dates - seems their definition of "sold out" means just the standing tickets. Genuinely tempted by this, I saw Steps there two years ago (brilliant) so might check this out for the lols!

Sorry to bump up an old thread but I've only just heard this for the first time, which must sound astonishing for anyone all over Europe - I can't believe how huge this was in pretty much every country except the UK. Mostly #1, a few #2s - #7 in Slovakia - and in the UK it only reached #66? What the hell happened for it to flop so hard over here? Did Psy steal all the "Foreign language song with silly dance routine" glory?

They really should have just gone completely over the top with a thumping Calvin Harris production/Pitbull "Yeah, picture Ebola with a Kodak!" rap/IT'S FUUUUUUUUUUUSSSE/etc. It would have been ridiculous but still for a good cause and amusing in a novelty sense. I actually prefer this to Band Aid 30 for said reasons, if you're going to rewrite a classic at least go nuts with it. qWJdV5SqT68

...so they've brought Bono back to re-record his "famous line" only to completely change the line?

Every Now since Now 79 has seen me know less and less of them <_< For me the best since then have been Now 82 and Now 86, I only know a handful here but hopefully listening to it will reveal some big hits I've missed over the last few months. 'Rude' is the best out of those, fantastic track, although out the remaining ones I know, Ugly Heart, Faded, and (erm) All About That Bass have their moments, embarrassingly so in Meghan's case - the lyrics mega irritate me but damn that's a good tune.

...bump? I'd start a new thread given recent rumours, but I remembered I did one this time a year ago and it's interesting to look back at the predictions. I would definitely now add Ella Henderson to my initial list, and absolutely Ed Sheeran as someone rightly pointed out I missed the first time around - didn't realise just how huge he'd be over the next year at the time! Plus a couple of acts like Rixton, Jess Glynne, Sam Smith etc.

...you're not Paul Gambaccini, are you? :lol: I think it's a major falsehood to suggest that the dominance of electronic music is a recent thing, as you could have said this any year since about 1981 whether you're referring to synthpop/acid house/rave/Eurodance/trance etc. What is true is that, a decade or two ago, you'd have an older 35+ customer strolling through their local supermarket and see that new Celine Dion/Wet Wet Wet/Bryan Adams etc song they heard on the radio or saw on that film the other day and pop it in their trolley, either for themselves or as a present for their granny/kids/dog etc. The loss of physical singles has completely put an end to the impulse single buy and concentrated things more on your usual teen/twentysomething buyers who know how to operate iTunes or Spotify. When a ballad does chart today, it'll generally be by a young late teen/early twentysomething star a similar age to most of those who buy it, not an established act who've been around for years anymore. Ok, 'Let It Go' somewhat flies in the face of that - sung by a 43 year old Broadway star - but most who buy it probably aren't picturing Idina Menzel, they're picturing Queen Elsa from Frozen. The only recent one I can think of that genuinely does stand out is All Of Me, which has become John Legend's biggest ever hit all over the world and he's been releasing stuff for over a decade.

9nBDlyGSogw Totally, utterly, undeservedly and shamefully robbed of what would have been one of the best #1s of the noughties by a release screw-up. Shops received the single on the Saturday, put it on shelves immediately and sold 809 copies of it too early, charting it at #68 on its one day of sales. A week later and a posthumous track by Aaliyah beats it to the top by 595 copies!

Late 2007/early 2008 was when all the Central London music shops started steadily downsizing their single sections. The HMV down the road had already substantially reduced theirs so while shopping in the Zavvi I thought I'd take a picture of something that seemed like it would soon be a thing of the past - which it was just a few weeks later. Still caused some funny looks from a couple of staff and customers when the flash went off though :P Weird to think that back then, you had the HMV in Bond Street, Oxford Street and Trocadero plus the Virgin Megastore/Zavvi in Tottenham Court Road and Piccadilly Circus, all of which are now closed down. So many teenage shopping memories in all of those.

Thanks everyone! I used to buy a mixture of CD singles and iTunes downloads right up to when iTunes doubled their bitrate in late 2009, when I bought less and less - last one I bought was Cee-Lo Green's Forget You. As mentioned it was just as Estelle/Kanye's American Boy overtook Duffy's Mercy. The "chart" on the wall isn't actually the official one though and I'm not sure whether it's the physical chart or just one created by Zavvi - both 'Something Good 08' by Utah Saints and 'I Thought It Was Over' by The Feeling are top 5, which neither were in the proper chart. The last Central London store (and last store I saw at all) to keep their big CD single section was HMV Oxford Street, which went around August-September 2009. You used to be able to find every track in the top 40 there and tons from the previous few months - you could still buy 'Angels' by Robbie Williams there over a decade after it was released!

The big (ok minor) talking point of the late 2000s was the imminent death of CD singles, and generally physical singles as a whole as the iTunes revolution took hold. Here are two photos I took in two Central London music shops - now both closed down - four years apart, showing the rapid diminishing range of singles on offer. First Zavvi in Piccadilly Circus in March 2008, featuring the entire top 20 and more: http://i.imgur.com/Tehoihh.jpg And HMV Oxford Circus in February 2012, a depressing few consisting of charity/fanbase singles, songs that completely missed the top 40, and unsold Tinchy Stryder/Helping Haiti songs that even then were over two years old: http://i.imgur.com/BqOBtiS.jpg Even the second image is now long a thing of the past and I'm no longer aware of any being made. I wondered a few years back if there'd be some sort of big fanfare for the "last ever" physical CD single, but instead, like the cassette single a decade earlier, it seems to have just completely fizzled out into unloved, disinterested banishment. Are there any songs in the top 40 that have a physical, and if not, does anyone know the last chart to feature one?

That was such a weird situation with Falling Stars/Star to Fall...from what I can see Cabin Crew had the initial idea, but due to some problems clearing the sample (which ended up being solved by getting the original Boy Meets Girl singer to re-record it) the Sunset Strippers version was some sort of rush-record/release by the record label who owned the original song. And then Mylo did a third version very shortly after with In My Arms - imagine if the original Boy Meets Girl track had been re-released, there'd have been four songs in the chart with the same vocals! It was the Sunset Strippers one that got all the radio play, which seems deeply unfair on Cabin Crew but to be fair Sunset Strippers did actually improve on it with their version. It was similar to the December 2000 Phatt Bass/Operation Blade situation of two songs using the same sample, and it happened again a year later with two remixes of the Baywatch theme.

This thread was originally going to be listing the first song of each decade that could be considered a proper classic song, obviously there's different definitions to that but based on what seem to be the longest-lasting hits, 1980s is probably a tie between The Specials - Too Much Too Young and Blondie - Atomic depending on your musical tastes (for me it's Atomic by a landslide), 1990s is surely Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U, 2000s is probably All Saints - Pure Shores but then if you want to include dance/trance anthems you've got the likes of 'Communication', 'Airwave' and 'Sandstorm' too. Then we get to this decade and I've absolutely no idea. All the ones in bold above were released in either January or February, whereas 2010 - especially early 2010 - seems full of songs that, while popular at the time, really don't seem to have lasted that long in public conciousness in comparison to any of the above. Irritatingly, Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' just misses out by being released at the very end of 2009, a shame as otherwise for me that would easily win it. So what do you think is the first song released in this decade that properly deserves to be called a classic? Telephone? Pass Out? Baby? Something else? And, if you like, what would you say for other decades?

Ok now I'm absolutely mystified. BPI's page says the lowest year for vinyl in recent times was 2007, with 205,000 sales. Which I thought seemed odd as the "vinyl revival" stories were definitely around by then, and sure enough here's a news article from the same year claiming vinyl sales are soaring, when the BPI seems to indicate they were in fact slipping pretty much every year since the 90s: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/155...e-in-sales.html Forgive me for sounding slightly obsessive about it, but it's a story that seems to keep re-appearing every year and I've always been a bit suspicious of it as it never seems to make any sense - there's no obvious surge in vinyl on the high street, you haven't even been able to buy record players for the best part of 20 years, so where's it all coming from and who's suddenly purchasing them?

Well yeah, that would make sense :blush: I've never quite understood why though, as it seems to be completely contradicted by the fact there's less and less actual places to buy records every year - vinyl sales are rising but record shops themselves are closing all the time. On the BPI's website there's figures for every year since 1996, but that's just even more confusing as there's a massive leap from 2012 to 2013 where it almost doubles? How can things suddenly go from 388,000 to 780,000 in the space of a year?

Katie Price - Free To Love Again Nadine Coyle - Insatiable Brian Harvey - Straight Up (No Bends) Richard Blackwood - Mama Who Da Man Andy Scott-Lee - Unforgettable Vanilla - No Way No Way Rebecca Black - Friday Harry Styles - Bohemian Rhapsody

From 1977, this isn't just desperate, it's actually slightly offensive. Mere weeks after the death of Elvis Presley in the August, some Dutch bloke hurriedly writes and releases a song called I Remember Elvis Presley and, unbelievably, gets a #1 hit all over Europe and a #4 hit here: LL_Q61uR-V0 Not a charity record or anything, just a way of getting a really easy hit while the world is still mourning.

...am I going nuts or has there been some sort of story about vinyl being on the rise for every single year for at least the last decade?

24/06/00: Darude - Sandstorm PSYxT9GM0fQ "Bloody hell" I think are the words most people thought on hearing this, an astonishingly hard and pounding dance tune based for the most part on the same couple of notes being hit a few hundred times. It's achieved something of a miracle in working both as a club floorfiller but being poppy enough to grab a huge mainstream audience, as its chart positions all over Europe are showing - already one of the biggest sellers across the *entire continent* after debuting in its Finnish homeland last November. Give it a listen but perhaps wear a crash helmet and gloves if you do, as just one play of even the radio edit may well leave you exhausted. Darude - Sandstorm.

03/06/00: S Club 7 - Reach (3 weeks) xVzJIrpharU Oh now this is slightly glorious and perhaps S Club 7's finest hour. After three weeks you and everyone are perhaps sick of it but this surely is another future classic from the group who brought us the likes of Bring It All Back and S Club Party last year. Sounding similar in points to of all things the Phil Collins cover of 'You Can't Hurry Love', its optimistic joy is something hard to sneer at - as we enter our first summer of the new millennium, it's difficult not to wonder if perhaps most of the bad times are behind us and the 21st century will be one of peace, wealth and unity. Let's reach for the stars together!

27/05/00: Billie Piper - Day & Night Z9LjOQVBFmA Hooray for Billie Piper, pop's saviour who out of nowhere makes a big comeback with easily her best ever single! There's nothing new about 'Day & Night', following your standard Britney Spears/Backstreet Boys pop template, but what it does do is cram in catchiness in shedloads, allowing you bypass its lack of originality and just hear a killer, bang-up-to-date pop track from a revitalised star who has still to turn the age of 18. By the time this decade finishes she'll be 29, an age when she could very easily be still having hit singles. It's very hard not to imagine Billie Piper potentially being a future defining star of the new decade if she keeps on getting material this strong, but of course pop fame can disappear as quick as it arrives - remember the Thunderbugs? Exactly.