The evidence was damning, and there were consequences: shortly after the show aired, the CEO of a major record label resigned, supposedly “accidentally.” But what was really surprising was the impact The Chart Busters had on chart popularity. He had none. Audiences didn’t turn off Radio 1’s Sunday night countdown in disgust. There was no drop in TOTP ratings. Children continued to sneak radios into school to listen to the new No. 1 revealed on Tuesday lunchtimes. As if the Top 40 were simply an impregnable fact of British musical life, too important and long-standing to be shaken even by accusations that it was, at least partially, fixed. The singles chart used by the BBC established itself as the market leader, triumphing over those compiled by NME, Melody Maker and Record Retailer. (Actually, the BBC chart was originally just a summation of all the others, but from 1969 it was a separate entity – compiled, as the Radio 1 DJs flashily reminded us, “by the British Market Research Bureau”.) From at the time, the Top 40 more or less defined pop in Britain: “the most important piece of promotion any record can get”, as one interviewee put it. Controversy… Kate Bush’s running up That Hill was originally number 1. Photo: United Archives/Alamy He was omnipresent. Walk into a record store and there they were – pages pinned to the wall, singles on the shelves. Even if you professed to hate it and everything it stood for, the chart still seemed totemic: the Top 40 was the thing that “serious” rock bands – most famously Led Zeppelin – faced themselves by refusing to release singles. You could scoff at it, ignore it or dismiss it as a corrupt joke, but nothing could affect its position: The Only Map That Matters, in the words of Radio 1’s rising ringer. It’s like a piece of software that used to work, but now has tons of updates, patches, and bug fixes Until something – or something – affected it. This year, the UK Singles Chart celebrates its 70th birthday in a markedly different climate, one in which its grip on the public imagination – and indeed the music industry – seems to have loosened completely. It no longer feels ubiquitous. When was the last time you walked into a record store and saw the Top 40 or read a news story about a hotly contested “battle” for No.1? When was the last time you heard music-crazed teenagers talking about where a song was on the charts? Even the Christmas No. 1, once the most famous place of all, hardly gets any attention. Perhaps it lost its luster in the era of The X Factor, casually placed on TV schedules so that the winner’s debut single was released a week before Christmas, almost guaranteed to top the festive chart. This incredibly cynical piece of marketing resulted in some of the least memorable Christmas No 1s of all time. Say what you like about Bob the Builder or Mr Blobby, but they were at least impressive in a way that Ben Haenow’s cover of OneRepublic’s Something I Need wasn’t. For the past four years, the Christmas No 1 has been a charity single from a YouTube video about sausage rolls, which seems to have prompted little more than a collective shrug. The feeling that no one cares is hard to avoid. Nobody cares; … LadBaby has been the Christmas No. 1 for the past four years Part of the problem is that traditional media outlets for the Top 40 have waned or disappeared. TOTP was put out of its misery 16 years ago. Listener numbers for Radio 1’s flagship Sunday Countdown have been falling in the early 00s. By 2002, its audience had fallen by 300,000 to 2.6 million. by 2020, with the show moving to the Friday night drive time, it only drew 1.4 million. By contrast, Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops – in which Paul Gambaccini ranks the Top 20s from the 60s to the 00s – gets 2.5 million. A few years ago, the Daily Mail cited this as proof that “old songs are the best”. It’s more likely that the only people who listen to charts are old enough to remember when they mattered. To be fair, the Official Charts company, which took over the compilation in 1990, has done its best to maintain interest in a changed landscape: it has a beautiful website that runs news features, lists new releases and has a searchable data. It’s also important to give out a physical prize to each act that goes #1, which makes for a useful photo opportunity. But it feels like it’s fighting a losing battle to capture the attention of the traditional tweens and twentysomething chart audience, whose listening habits have completely changed as a result of streaming. Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every season, every week Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The years since Spotify’s launch in the UK have given rise to a strange phenomenon, with artists being awarded gold and platinum sales certificates for singles that had almost no impact on the charts. Alt-rockers Catfish and the Bottlemen released three platinum-selling singles, which peaked at No. 81. Rapper Tyler, Creator’s See You Again and singer-songwriter Rex Orange County’s Best Friend and Loving Is Easy managed to go gold without entering the singles chart at all. This is because these songs have been streamed in huge volume for a long time. However, having Big Singles Artists who barely appear on the singles charts can only make the singles chart seem irrelevant. Chart compilers have struggled to keep up, trying to achieve an impossible balancing act in which streaming is reflected – 100 paid streams or 600 ad-supported streams count as one sale – while also trying to maintain the appearance of the singles chart. as always: heavily dominated by recent releases, with a wide range of artists and a high turnover of songs in weekly traffic. After what could also be called the Ed Sheeran Incident – when the release of his 2017 album ÷ resulted in nine Top 10 spots being occupied by his tracks – the number of songs allowed on the chart by a single artist was limited to three. That same year saw the introduction of Accelerated Chart Ratios, designed to ensure certain songs wouldn’t be around forever. After three weeks on the chart, the number of streams needed to count as one sale doubles to 200 paid streams or 1,200 ad-supported streams. It caused controversy earlier this year when Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill reached No 2 despite selling and streaming significantly more than Harry Styles’ No 1 As It Was. It turned out that the ACR rule applied to all songs over three years old. Faced with the prospect of denying a beloved British music institution the No.1 it had clearly earned, the rule was overturned the following week. Overheated madness… the cover of NME August 1995. Photo: Steve Double You can understand why these rules were put in place, but the result is an increasingly byzantine system that clearly doesn’t give an accurate picture of what’s popular: there’s a sense that the singles chart is like a piece of software that used to work but is subject to so many updates , patches and bug fixes over the years that it is no longer fit for purpose. It’s perhaps understandable that record companies care a lot less about the charts than they did back when the Top 40 was considered so important that they bribed store owners to fudge the numbers. Clearly, no record company is going to thumb its nose at No.1 singles, but increasingly the chart is less important as a measure of popularity than other measures of success, from analyzing data about “rich engagement” (how they spread the streaming assets across an artist’s catalog) to the size and activity of fan communities on sites like Discord. And then there’s Spotify’s World Chart, which aggregates daily streaming data from around the world. It’s a situation that would once have seemed unimaginable, even to the World in Action interviewee who thought the charts were “funny”. At 70, the chart single finds itself largely unloved, ignored and dismissed as irrelevant: to paraphrase the bleak First World War song, it seems to still be here because it’s always been here. Without wanting to spoil the birthday celebrations, it’s hard not to wonder if he’ll be around to celebrate his 80th.
The five greatest singles battles
The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane v Engelbert Humperdinck – Release Me (1967) A chart battle that tells you a lot about the pace at which pop music moved in the mid-60s and the rifts that opened as a result. Every new Beatles single since 1963 had reached No 1: their most experimental and arguably their best no, with a ballad designed to appeal to those left behind by pop’s relentless, chemically accelerated progress: a victory for the powers that be of the reaction. Sex Pistols – God Save the Queen v Rod Stewart – I Don’t Want to Talk About It (1977) The rage caused by sex…
