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Illuminations from the throne

Statistics don’t lie.

Top 100 Best Selling Singles.

I’ve always been partial to a chart countdown. Something in our nature compels us to rank songs, albums and artists based on one criteria or another. I’ve just been listening to the Top 30 Ultimate British Groups, voted for by Radio 2 listeners in the UK. While I broadly agreed with the results, a few travesties did ignite inner rage.

Take That above Oasis? Girls Aloud above The Spice Girls?? Massive Attack nowhere in sight??? Well, there’ll always be a debate. That’s the fun of these things. But when a chart is based on sales, there’s no room for debate. Or is there?

At some point in the mid 80s, I discovered the weekly Top 40 on Radio 1 and became an avid listener. This was musical perfection to my 11 year old ears. One pop gem after another coming out of the little yellow transistor radio I’d got for Christmas, culminating after two hours’ anticipation with the top tune of the week; timeless classics like Chain Reaction, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Papa Don’t Preach, You Win Again...

My love of the charts began to wane in the early 90s when the quality of songs getting into the top 10 dipped markedly in my opinion. At the same time, tapes passed around at school by bands like Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins opened my eyes to something quite astonishing. Much better music existed outside the charts, stuff I’d never heard on the radio. How could such great songs be overlooked while bland, unforgettable dross was going straight in at No. 1 every week?

I knew the Top 40 was based on sales but I didn’t appreciate back then that sales are based on marketing. And how are those sales measured anyway? As a kid I simply accepted that someone out there magically knew exactly how many records had been bought. Every week. In every single record store in the country. They passed the list on to King Of The Countdown, Bruno Brookes, who would dramatically reveal it on the BBC's flagship radio show. It must therefore be fair and accurate. Nothing to question.

By the early 2000s, the pop charts no longer stirred within me the same level of excitement. I’d long since disregarded them as a hallmark of quality when I started working for Universal Music, part of the world's largest entertainment corporation, who owned a pile of iconic record labels: Island, Interscope, Mercury, Decca, Geffen, Motown... to name just a few which, as it happens, were not insignificantly funded by my pocket money. I was part of the grandly named Research & Information Department, a team of three whose job it was, in a nutshell, to find stuff out.

If there was anything anyone wanted to know, be it how many albums Musical Youth sold while they were signed to Island Records or what’s going to be the next big thing, they’d call us, firmly under the impression that, somehow, we would know. Unfortunately, there was no reliable way to answer questions like that so we tended to make shit up. Our skill lay in making it sound plausible.

Not surprisingly sales figures were the prime area of interest. On a typical call I might be asked: How many records did Elton John sell last year? How many might his next album sell? Can we get to number one this Christmas?

I couldn’t predict the future but I could get hold of recent sales data from a bunch of cool guys at The Official Charts Company. Yes, such a company exists. I now knew, and often met for lunch, the very people I'd once thought of as some kind of travelling, data gathering magicians.

It seemed like a gargantuan task to me but it's actually quite easy to register almost every purchase of a CD, cassette or vinyl record in the UK. In those days, the big chains accounted for the bulk of sales and they were all hooked into the Chart Company’s database, as were the vast majority of independent stores up and down the country. Amazon and the other main online players also reported their sales. Streaming and downloading was still free candy but that prickly pear wouldn’t be ignored for much longer.

Such comprehensive coverage was made possible by the internet. But the internet hadn’t been around very long. How then, were sales tracked in the 80s when I was religiously listening to the end results of this weekly endeavour? In fact, the charts started in 1952. How the hell did you count the number of records sold in the entire country in 1952?

It was quite crushing to learn the truth. You couldn’t. Not very accurately anyway. The main source of data came from the sales to retail, i.e. units were counted not when they were bought by a customer in a store but when they were shipped to that store by distributors. If you wanted to manipulate the charts, opportunities to fudge the numbers were ripe.

For example, if Tower Records ordered 250,000 units of a new Rick Astley album to be shipped over the next 2 months, it could be made to look like a single week’s sales, guaranteeing a number one chart position, although you'd have to check the Depeche Mode sales team weren't planning to do the same thing in the same week.

Copies of an album that proudly began their lives in a prominent window display before being relegated to a regular rack, buried in the bargain bin, the basement and finally landfill, would still count as a sale because the record company had sold them to the retail sector.

And coverage was sparse. Only a few retailers would be asked to provide data and statistical modelling would estimate what total sales might have been across the whole country. Bruno Brookes never mentioned statistical modelling. So next time you read that Dark Side Of The Moon has sold 45 million copies worldwide, you can be sure it’s an over-inflated guess.

Nowadays, we have the technology to tighten up that kind of nonsense. If someone wanted to know how many copies A Rush Of Blood To The Head, released in 2002, had sold in the UK, I could give an accurate figure for actual over-the-counter sales. Not so easy for Pass The Dutchie, released in 1982. So when Musical Youth decided to sue Universal for unpaid royalties, I began to receive increasingly desperate calls from various people at Island.

“Hey John. I know I’ve asked you this before, but can you give me any idea at all how many records Musical Youth sold while they were on our label? There must be some way of finding out.”

“Yes”, I’d answer, “you'd have thought so.”

The Official Charts Company also set the chart rules. That there were rules was another aspect I’d never considered before but they're certainly necessary. Larger labels are able to put far more marketing power behind their releases than struggling indies, a lopsided playing field which comes into focus every now and then.

Take the infamous britpop battle of 1995. Blur were part of the EMI corporate machine while Oasis were still on the independent Creation label. Despite all the hype generated that week, there was only ever going to be one winner.

In 2002, a TV reality show formed two groups who would compete for the Christmas number one that year. ‘Popstars The Rivals’ was hugely popular. Millions of viewers no doubt expected a fair fight but the boy band were trounced, this time by Universal’s muscle power. Our girl band went on to become one of Britain’s best loved groups - Girls Aloud.

Free gifts was a topic often on the agenda of a record company power lunch, which also had to be regulated. It was allowed to give away a small poster with CDs but stickers, deemed to give too big an advantage to companies that could afford to write off the cost of such valuable items of merchandise, were forbidden. Don’t think the goliaths of the industry didn’t try to change the rules. I was once part of a meeting where a room full of adults argued for hours about stickers. Turns out there is indeed plenty of room to debate a chart based on sales.

Rules imply that some releases might be ineligible for the chart. Another cynical trick used by evil corporate cronies to inflate sales, is adding different bonus tracks to the end of an album, creating what they’d call ‘collector’s editions’. In other words, if you're a loyal fan and want every song by your favourite artist, we'll fleece you into buying more than one copy of their album.

Unbelievably this was allowed up to a point before too big a variance in the track listing was regarded as a different album. Ronan Keating’s solo debut crossed this line. Nothing to do with him, someone at Polydor messed up so what should have been a guaranteed No. 1 for a big name was disqualified from the chart. Fair enough but that meant another artist took the honours that week, despite selling less. Not something casual listeners, who had no reason to doubt the integrity of the Top 40, would have been aware of.

The ultimate chart was published in 2002 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the hallowed countdown: The Top 100 Best Selling Singles, Ever! The Chart Company made a big deal of keeping it secret until it was revealed over the course of an epic four hour TV show. Despite my insight into how imprecise the final list would inevitably be, I was quite looking forward to watching it.

I received a phone call one afternoon from someone who introduced herself as a researcher at Channel 4. She explained they’d decided to include a segment in the programme highlighting some of the artists who, perhaps surprisingly, were missing from the list. One omission was The Rolling Stones who had been signed to Decca, a label now owned by Universal which is why she’d been put through to me. She wanted to know; what was their biggest hit and how many copies had it sold. She sounded nice so instead of telling her no such data exists, I said “Sure, I can find that out for you.”

I’d recently read an article about the dramatic decline of singles sales. It claimed that in 1960 you’d need to shift, on average, 200,000 copies to have a No. 1 record. The peak came during the 70s, the golden age of the 7” single, when a chart topper would sell more like 350,000. By 2001 it was down to a paltry 25,000.

I looked up The Rolling Stones discography on Wikipedia. Nodding and singing to myself as I read through the list, I decided their best songs were from the 1960s and picked my favourite of their No. 1s from that decade: The Last Time.

That was the extent of my research. I sent an email to Channel 4, telling them The Rolling Stones biggest hit was The Last Time and it had sold approximately 200,000 copies, “....although I should stress, one researcher to another, that sales data in the 1960s was not as accurate as it is now. I hope this is useful. Thanks. Call again any time.”

I added the disclaimer because I suspected my finger in the air estimate was far too low but I had to underestimate. If I’d given a figure higher than the song at number 100, my position as Universal’s chief expert at finding stuff out might be questioned.*

A few months later, I settled down to watch the Ultimate Top 100 show. Half an hour in, the narrator said it was time to take a break from the countdown to reveal some surprising absentees from the chart. Huh, I thought, a little bell ringing somewhere in my head.

The following montage showcased a selection of huge acts with lengthy catalogues, crammed with classic hits, none of which had managed to crack the top 100 of all time, including... The Rolling Stones! Over some old footage of Mick & Keith dancing comically to their song The Last Time, a caption appeared.

The Rolling Stones biggest hit in the UK was The Last Time which only sold 200,000 copies.

“That was me!”, I exclaimed, jumping up from the sofa. “I told them that. They believed me!”

* At the time this chart was published, the UK’s 100th best selling single of all time was Mississippi by Pussycat. Who knew. Sales of 947,000 were attributed. Attributed - not registered - because it was released in 1976. I didn’t do the Stones justice at all. I could have comfortably credited them with a few hundred thousand more sales.

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