Still No 1? How the music charts lost their lustre

A rosy, nostalgic haze may hang over your memories of the Top 40 chart: having an emotional investment when your favourite act broke into the Top 10, or was caught up in a battle with their nemesis (like Blur v Oasis in 1995); listening to the countdown with eager fingers hovering over the “record” button on your cassette player; moaning to friends that Wet Wet Wet were still No 1; sitting on the sofa, like millions of others in the UK, glued to the sturm und drang of Top of the Pops every Thursday evening.

But the chances are you no longer know, or care, who is No 1. If you guessed “probably Ed Sheeran”, you’d be right a fair amount of the time – cumulatively his songs have spent over a year at No 1. Perhaps your ears only prick up when music from your past gets to the top spot, like Kate Bush in 2022 with Running Up That Hill or Wham! with Last Christmas, umm, last Christmas. Meanwhile, the album chart is constantly clogged by hits collections by the likes of Abba, Queen, Eminem and Elton John (Abba Gold has spent 1,159 weeks on the chart and counting). For younger music fans, too, it is harder for the charts to mean anything to them when Spotify, YouTube and TikTok are more powerful than radio, TV and the music press ever were.

Related: Ed Sheeran named UK’s most played artist of the year for seventh time

Faced with its own possible obsolescence, the official charts is having to work harder to find a new, a different or even a slightly reduced relevance. In the days of physical sales, it was a straightforward tabulation process: the single or album that sold the most copies that week was No 1. But the advent of digital downloads shifted that and meant that, as of 2007, any track from any time in history could theoretically qualify for the charts without needing a concurrent physical release.

The chances are you no longer know, or care, who is No 1

The most profound recalibration of the UK charts was the addition of streaming exactly 10 years ago, via services like Spotify, which warped the whole landscape – and necessitated increasingly complex ways of weighting the apples and oranges of physical and streaming sales. In its summary of the impact of a decade of streaming, the Official Charts Company (OCC) named Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi as the “most streamed song of the Official Charts streaming era”. In addition, old and new tracks, because they are all simultaneously and instantly available digitally, now coexist in a way they never had to in the past, and make “consumption” harder than ever to tally.

For albums especially, where one download or physical sale is currently equivalent to 1,000 streams, it is still possible to “game” the charts using complex and cunning strategies. UK label trade body the British Phonographic Industry reported that around 86% of albums going straight to No 1 in 2023 saw over half their sales come from physical formats. Acts will put out multiple vinyl editions and do in-store tours of record shops (where fans often get in for the price of a CD or LP purchase), and this can add thousands of sales to their week-one tally. Shed Seven did it in January, and got the first No 1 album of their 34-year career with A Matter of Time. Others doing in-stores as a “belt and braces” approach to getting a No 1 this year include The Last Dinner Party and The Libertines.

“The album chart to me is a relic of a bygone era,” says Alex Hardee of live agency Wasserman Music, who represent acts such as Billie Eilish, Blackpink, Blur, Raye and SZA. “It is purely now a battle of record labels manipulating physical sales to get to No 1, which is actually an annoyance to a live agent. The importance of getting to No 1 is irrelevant to us.”

Not everyone agrees. Jack Saunders hosts The Official Chart show on Radio 1 every Friday afternoon, which draws on average 1.3 million listeners, 53% of them aged 15-34. “The chart has gone from perhaps feeling tired at points, when you have Ed Sheeran at No 1 for 12 weeks straight, to a really engaging, exciting race for No 1,” he says. “Now you’ve got a really nice balance of new, old, future and classic.”

It is still possible to 'game' the charts using complex and cunning strategies

Unsurprisingly, Martin Talbot, chief executive of the OCC, also argues the chart is more essential now, when all the music ever recorded is constantly available and millions of new tracks are released each year. “The chart is there to make sense of a very chaotic, complex and comprehensive music market,” he says.

The OCC is keenly aware it must keep finding ways into new and younger audiences. Lauren Kreisler is director of brand and digital at the OCC. One of the first things she did when she joined in 2011 was to create an award to be sent to artists when they got to No 1. It has snowballed, and major acts, including Taylor Swift and the Rolling Stones, now diligently pose with their award and post the photos on social media, giving the OCC brand enormous reach.

The OCC’s marketing also increasingly leans towards short-form video on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. “We have introduced Top 10 in 60 Seconds to create a bite-size version of the singles chart that can sit neatly alongside the broadcast show and what we do on our own digital platforms,” says Kreisler. “It goes out on all our social media channels, Radio 1 and BBC Sounds. That reaches a huge audience.”

According to the OCC’s own research, 69% of Official Chart followers say the chart is their primary way of discovering new music (“more than streaming platforms, radio, YouTube, TikTok and even their friends”), rising to 72% for Official Chart followers under 25. Of course, these numbers are based on people who follow the Official Charts, so are a subset of the total population. Its website gets 3.1 million visits a month and 7.2 million page impressions.

Does that echo what actual teenagers think of the charts? Ellie (16) and Luke (14) are a sister and brother from Ballymena in Northern Ireland. They both love music and for them Spotify is everything. “On Spotify, sometimes I’ll listen to the recommended artists and then I’ll see if I like it,” says Ellie on how she discovers music.

I ask both of them if they know who is currently No 1. “No,” they say in unison.

“The charts are the most recent and most played, but I like to listen to my own music,” says Ellie.

Luke adds: “I am not really aware of the charts. I usually choose my own playlist with all the songs I’ve found and put into it.”

The cut and thrust of the charts meant pretty much everything to people like me growing up. But that was admittedly 40 years ago, and one has to be wary of overly romanticising their youth.

The charts are constantly being recalibrated to accommodate changing consumption patterns and reflect what’s actually popular, and to ward off attempts to game them or exploit loopholes. As a result, how they are calculated has become incredibly complex. At the moment, 100 streams of a track by UK-based users on a premium service (eg Apple Music or the paid version of Spotify) “equals” the equivalent of a download or physical single sale. For ad-funded streaming services (eg the free tier of Spotify or the official video on YouTube), 600 streams “equals” a sale. To weed out older songs, “accelerated decline” rules are applied: if a track has been on the chart for at least nine weeks and has, at some point, experienced a decline for three consecutive weeks, the number of streams needed to “equal” a sale rises to 200 from premium or 1,200 from ad-funded services.

The charts meant pretty much everything to people like me growing up – but that was 40 years ago

Despite all this, the UK’s Top 40 most-streamed tracks of 2023 was still full of old songs that continue to chart off the back of their use in films, television and social media. Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor, originally from 2001, reached as high as No 2 at the start of the year (thanks to Saltburn). And Natasha Bedingfield’s 2004 hit Unwritten got as high as 12 in March (thanks to the romcom Anything But You). The immovable Mr Brightside by The Killers, originally released in 2003, earned the band two Guinness World Records certificates on 4 July – one for the “longest stay on UK singles chart by a group” (at that point 416 weeks) and another for the “most cumulative weeks on UK singles chart (one song)”. It is at No 60 in the singles chart this week.

For albums, it is a whole other riddle: 1,000 streams “equals” one album sale (download or physical). And after the absurdity of Ed Sheeran having all 16 songs from his album ÷ in the Top 20 in 2017, rules were put in place to ensure that only three tracks from any one album can chart. The fact that old chestnuts like Abba and Queen still fill the charts is partly down to songs by these artists appearing on multiple playlists and boosting the aggregate streams for a hits compilation. If the same track appears on multiple albums, its chart-eligible streams are awarded to the album highest in the charts (invariably the biggest Best Of collection – so the already big keeps getting bigger).

Shed Seven’s No 1 earlier this year was based on physical sales of around 15,300 and 2,000 album downloads. The highest-streaming album that week was The Weeknd’s hits collection The Highlights with around 7,300 streaming-equivalent sales (plus 200 physical sales). The fact that 97% of A Matter of Time’s chart performance came from pure sales meant it streaked ahead of everyone else in that week’s chart. It slumped to number 29 in the following week’s chart.

The UK singles chart began very unscientifically in 1952 when Percy Dickins, the ad manager of the New Musical Express, called round a handful of record shops to ask what was selling. Then, via ubiquity on Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, it went through its golden era by fostering a deeper resonance with a broad range of consumers. Now it is arguably swinging back again to be something the music business pays more attention to than consumers do.

“The charts are a commercial indicator of how a campaign is performing,” says Alex Burford, managing director of Warner Records UK, “but a lot of what we do is about developing artists … usually the chart metrics will come in as a result of a campaign that’s been building over a long period of time.”

The charts have a big influence on the retail sector, too. Because they help albums get a better immediate chart placing than through streaming alone, in-store performances are also booming. “In-store shows 15 years ago were a little bit awkward, with the band standing in the corner with an acoustic guitar,” says Lawrence Montgomery, managing director of the Rough Trade shops. Now they are a slick operation, and Rough Trade, across all its shops as well as tie-ins with bigger venues, put on 850 such shows in 2023. “It was responsible for about 12% of our sales last year,” Montgomery says. “That was the fastest growing channel for us. But we need to make sure things are sustainable. We are cautious of it being a bubble.”

The live music business is, however, less than overjoyed about this arms race and also questions the validity of national charts in the streaming era. Only “a stupid festival booker” would book acts based on a chart position, says Hardee. For him, a placing on Spotify’s global charts is a better impact metric, dismissing domestic charts as a growing anachronism.

Kreisler argues that the struggle to be the centre of national dialogue is not unique to the charts: all media brands are trying to crack this conundrum. “Gone are the days when we could just beam the chart via one linear TV show [Top of the Pops] into the homes of millions of households across the UK. Job done, put your feet up. Audiences are fragmented in a way they’ve never been before.”

The charts will never be perfect (are 100 streams really the same as a purchase?), but combining streams and sales into a hybrid chart is surely preferable to a series of consumption-specific charts that end up being too vague to mean anything.

It all depends on who you ask. The chart either means nothing or it means everything. The chart is either more relevant than ever or it is utterly irrelevant. It is simultaneously deader than it has ever been or more alive than it has ever been. Call it Schrödinger’s chart.