Ongarboy

Come to Ireland where the country is obsessed with Zach Bryan! He sold 3 sell out nights for 180,000 fans recently in Dublin. Ireland has a population of 5M. UK approximately 13 times bigger at 65M. Imagine him filling Wembley 39 times...that's the equivalent proportion!! Ireland was previously nuts about Garth Brooks...people give out about the poor turnover of the UK charts but the Irish charts are even more static as the population follow a smaller pool of musicians fanatically and for longer!

Can see it going 19 or 20 times Platinum by the time the tour hysteria ends!

Out of interest, what ranking and sales total does Whitney Houston's Best Of album have in the Top 100, please? It must be near double platinum soon. Thanks!

While Ordinary is now a Marmite song, at least it's refreshing that the best selling/most consumed song of the year so far is actually a song that isn't a carry over from previous years!

Wow...3 Noah Kahan tracks certified. It's like all his other songs became popular simultaneously on the back of Stick Season! Interesting to see Dolly's version of I Will Always Love You go Gold. Whitney's version seems under certified at just 2xP (last certified in 1993) considering it was a 10 weeks at Number One juggernaut of the 1990s and is still widely streamed to the current day. Has it not accumulated even 600k in almost 32 years to earn another platinum cert?

Surprised Adele's 30 has "only" sold 900k almost 4 years on...her stratospheric superstar sheen definitely had diminished by that album.

This list of No.1s probably could feature quite appropriately in the "Most Ordinary No.1" thread!! too!!

I think you mustn't have lived through the 80s or 90s if you haven't heard of most of those songs. Even if you despised the artist or acts or had no interest in pop music, they were pretty ubiquitous songs, particularly the 80s ones you listed and are definitely not ordinary! 😃

I think this definitely fits! I was living abroad in 1996 back when hits in one country had no correlation with hits in another country concurrently and you were simply unable to listen to them unless someone posted you the CD or cassette single! I remember coming home that Christmas eager to hear the big hits and Number Ones I had missed over the previous 6 months including my first listen to Wannabee months after everyone else even though my friends and relatives kept talking about this new huge girl band on phone calls home. Anyway I digress, I gradually caught up on all the hits including Lemon Tree, How Bizarre etc etc among others but I remember thinking how super bland and non descript Forever Love sounded. It's a song I've never really heard ever since on the radio as I'm guessing the only airplay it received was on chart shows during its initial chart run....the definition of ordinary...

I think this is where this survey starts to become subjective. Maybe it's an age thing but I'd imagine most anyone born before 1980 would instantly recognise this song for better or for worse. It may have generated Marmite type opinions at the time but it definitely wouldn't be classified as ordinary or non descript in my opinion. It famously featured on film cult classic Priscilla, Queen of the Desert too and has been parodied and lampooned in sketches and comedy shows over the years and it's the type of tune that a drunken group would mockingly burst into song if it came on the airwaves back in the day! It was that type of song! 😃 An "ordinary" or forgettable song would never get that much positive or negative attention.

It's interesting that calendar years are no longer as important a benchmark for how successful a song is any more which is kind of a shame. As an 80s and 90s pop music child, I can still vividly associate huge hits from back in the day with different calendar years that also had other milestone moments for me as I came of age whereas nowadays hits carry over into multiple years (Benson Boone anyone?) as their longevity grows and grows from infinite passive streaming, that it's not as easy to associate a song with a particular year. I think it devalues the notion of "the biggest hits of 20**" as half those songs will also be on next year's or last year'slist too (or in albums cases, the next decade). Look at Julian's weekly sales to date list. We're well into Quarter 2 of 2025 but the vast majority of bestsellers included are all songs that were hits in 2024. I guess it's just another evolution in the way we consume and track music....

Apologies if this has been asked before but if a song appears on a parent studio album by an artist and then subsequently appears on a greatest hits album by that artist, which album does the song's streams go to for counting/certificaion purposes? The studio or compilation album or both(i.e double counted)? I'm seeing lots of legacy artists on the OCC Album charts by way of their greatest hits albums enjoying healthy streams of their most successful hit songs. Does this mean the patent albums no longer benefit from the songs successful streams? Would be interesting to know. Thanks!

Remember you're saying this to a community where many proclaim a Number 2 peak as being a flop if its the alleged rival of the diva they're stanning for.... I know this is more about flop singles but I remember Whitney Houston releasing a studio album (Just Whitney)in 2002 a few short years after her very successful My Love Is Your Live album.and a No.1 peaking Greatest Hits collection and it failed to make the Top 75...it entered at #76 and disappeared thereafter. One lead single Whatchoolookinat was released that failed to hit the top 10 (#13 peak) and all other singles release plans were cancelled. As a major fan, I was disappointed as despite the inferior lead single, the rest of the albums tracks were quite good and it remains an underrated album. Thankfully her legacy lives on as she us a permanent feature of the top 100 due to her extensive greatest hits catalogue.

It's just bizarre that some of the lesser Christmas songs are now generating multi platinum certs. If you asked me what the top 50 Christmas songs are each year, I'd never have even considered that Buble cover. I prefer the Perry Como version. I find Buble covers of every song inferior to the original..he makes them sound bland.

Scary that some people stream Wham and Mariah's Christmas songs every day over the summer....

I think it unintentionally became an end of night drinking session anthem /college student nights anthem and people just keep nostalgically stream it to relive their youth/the good old days, hence it's evergreen success.

Aren't pre February 1994 sales not considered when awarding BPI certs due to change in chart compiler at the time? As Danni's peak commercial era was pre 1994 IIRC, then I think her chance of obtaining certs is very slim as she dies not have enough legacy appeal as other pre 1994 artists who've done well or at least better in the post 1994 era with their past hits.

What is the reason for the recent resurgence in appeal for Brown Eyed Girl? Or it just like another "Everywhere " by Fleetwood Mac in that Gen Z have discovered and decided to embrace it?

Pre 1989 I believe Silver was 250k, Gold was 500k and Platinum was 1 million. Perhaps they should reintroduce that as its too "easy" to get awarded certs nowadays. The benchmarks are too low that every album track that even casual fans of artists have never heard of are getting certs.

Whitney Houston goes double platinum for classic banger IT'S NOT RIGHT BUT IT'S OKAY!!! I love that song...especially the Thunderpuss remix!

I like the new format too. Great work!!

Someone mentioned Adele's chart fluke above when she was at the pinnacle of he career. I don't think you can apply flukes to massive contemporary artists as their gigantic fanbase will consume anything past or present belonging to them. I do agree the song being ubiquitous on X Factor added to it's popularity. Flukes to me are majorly unexpected chart successes from artists who who had no previous hits or were not intended to be chart successes. Showing my age but I'd have called Nick Berry's Every Loser Wins a fluke as it appeared on Eastenders or the song used for Jason and Kylie's wedding on Neighbours. Robson and Jerome were flukes with their first hit but then milked it with every other single they released thereafter.

If only 17% of the UK population is made up of people of colour using the statistic quoted above and musicians of colour make up a similar percentage of all UK popular music artists, can you really say that demographic is under-represented? How is it possible to quantify without going through every artist thst ever had a top 40 single or album? Certainly, there will be under or over represented in some musical genres based on cultural associations, affinities etc ...eg country, heavy metal, folk vs RnB, rap or urban but even that is changing in recent years as musical genres became less typically racial exclusive.

I can't believe Westlife's "When You're Looking Like That" was not a top 100 single. It sounds so familiar and was played all the time on the radio back when it came out. I was certain it was one of their biggest hits.

Can I ask is the 1994 cutoff for singles only? Aren't album totals sold prior to 1994 included for certification purposes? If so, why can BPI recognise pre 1994 album sales but not single sales?