Off the record: The Top 10's back on trend

 Add your view

 

Hot property: Lady Gaga’s single Poker Face took 10 weeks to reach number one

Look here too

• Entertainment Podcast
• Paul Weller review

Lady Gaga is at number one with neither a bullet or a bang. The mini-Madonna's single, Poker Face, has quietly crept to the top spot over a period of 10 weeks — at least as quietly as an attractive woman in a microscopic leotard can creep. Her lengthy journey is definitive proof that the singles chart is interesting again. We have the rise of the download to thank.

Those old Sunday afternoons of crouching by the radio with a blank cassette, trying to tape the new top 40 and willing your favourite band to sneak a little higher may be behind us — you have to endure presenter Fearne Cotton's prattle if you want to listen to Radio 1's chart rundown today.

Nevertheless, some of that old magic is definitely back again. The chart has a narrative once more, and it feels like we're the ones controlling the plot.

It's all due to a rule created two years ago by the Official UK Charts Company, making downloads eligible for the chart without the need for a concurrent physical release. That, combined with the demise of high-street retailers such as Woolworths and Zavvi, means that 95 per cent of single sales are now through downloads — and they have rapidly increased in number. Nowadays, anything goes. The releases that used to have prominent shelf space in Woolies can no longer dominate, and sneaky tricks such as putting out two CDs with different B-sides to ensure extra sales (some say that's how Blur beat Oasis in the brutal Britpop single battle of 1995) won't help.

Last year there were 20 different number one singles, compared with 42 in 2000, when singles would be heavily discounted in the first week of release to secure a high chart placing, only to fall drastically in the following week. Now that such marketing ploys are irrelevant a good song can linger, wandering up and down the charts for months in some cases — Kings of Leon, Katy Perry, James Morrison and Jason Mraz all currently have tracks that have been in the top 40 for more than 20 weeks.

Those hits might not be everyone's idea of classics, but their prolonged success more accurately represents public tastes than the fickle days of boom and bust. If a single's no good, it will still disappear sharpish. U2's album went to number one because all U2 albums go to number one, but it seemed to me that the shaky performance of their single Get On Your Boots, which stalled at 12, was a better indicator of the quality of their comeback.

Another neat development is the new variety of different routes to the chart. If we like an old song we hear on an advert, a TV drama or heaven forfend, The X Factor, we can put it in the hit parade next week without having to wait for a sluggish record company to think of re-releasing it. Alexandra Burke and Jeff Buckley's battle of the Hallelujahs last Christmas would never have happened a decade ago.

It's now so easy to buy a single track that sales rocketed by a third to 115 million in 2008. Older people who don't do downloading will object that the singles chart doesn't reflect their tastes, but it was ever thus, granddad. For the rest of us, if we don't like the look of Lady Gaga's Poker Face, we have it in our power to replace it with anything in the wide world of music.

It's a long time since the top 40 had such an interesting plotline, with winners and losers often emerging outside the dictates of shop displays and radio playlists. Now all we need is a Fearne Cotton-free show to follow it all on. How about bringing back Top of the Pops?

NEW ON THE NET
*Following the comeback of Kasabian at the Albert Hall tonight, the first taste of the Leicester louts' new album can be downloaded for free at their website www.kasabian.co.uk from Tuesday. Vlad the Impaler is a schizophrenic dance rocker indebted to Primal Scream's wilder moments, constructed mainly of fuzzy bass and cries of “Get loose, get loose!”

*Veteran rock monsters Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction are teaming up for the NIN/JA tour this summer (do you see what they did there?). We're not included, it's just for Americans, but fans can still download six free previously unheard songs to mark the occasion at the tour's website,
www.ninja2009.com.

*Devon soul pop band The Rumble Strips might get a bit closer to the charts now that Mark Ronson (him again!) is working on their second album, due this summer.
The first track, the Dexys-style hollering of London, is free to download now at www.rumblestrips.co.uk.

 

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter