what is the poptimist position on this site?

[maura.livejournal.com]

http://www.itshouldhavebeennumber1.co.uk/

As of Sunday 7th January, changes to the chart rules mean that singles can make it into the charts from download sales alone - a CD release is no longer required. This puts the charts back in your hands and lets you decide what should be number 1 and when!

So, we decided to start this website so that together we can put right some wrongs. With your help, we plan to identify the songs we think were a number one hit, or should have been number one, but were kept from the top spot by some naf song, or possibly something just as good that happened to come out at precisely the same time.

We start Monday 12th February with Oasis "Roll With It". Released 14th August 1995, it made number two, pipped to the post in the famous Britpop battle by Blur with their single "Country House".

Register now to receive a reminder to come back on the 12th February and download "Roll With It". Downloads from the 12th will appear in the following weeks chart. Together we can generate enough sales to make it happen. Together we can re-write history by making "Roll With It" number 1 …as it should have been 12 years ago!

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if they actually MANAGE it more power to them! Getting a #1 is and always has been quite a difficult thing to do - the singles market doubled in size last year (admittedly from an all-time-low base), and you probably need c.50,000 individual people to ACTUALLY PART WITH MONEY in order to do it. This isn't like signing an Interweb petition!

I think the boat has sailed on this - Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles, who has a readymade audience of 10m people, pushed to get "Honey To The Bee" by Billie back in the charts, which (unlike Roll With It et al) is a song which most of his audience won't already have owned, and it got to number 18 or so. So being generous that's 10,000 sales out of 10,000,000 listeners, or 0.1%!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

(Cis obviously already knows the background to the Moyles stunt - this was for Maura, if she's getting copies of all responses!) :)

[umlauts.livejournal.com]

Tom OTM. "Honey To The Bee" is also a far better record than "Roll With It". As was "Country House", anyway.

FFS if we're going to exhume the britpop corpse for #2s, I have four words for everyone, all of six letters.

Common. People.
Slight. Return.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Is there a publicly accessible source that shows the actual sales numbers for chart singles?

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

No. Music Week reports some stuff each week, but that bit isn't online. Otherwise there are various online messageboards for chart obsessives where people report some of them, even though it's supposed to be confidential.

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

The singles market doubled in size last year but much of that growth was across a far wider range of titles - the 'singles market' is defined in terms of single track downloads, which includes any old tracks people choose to download. The number of singles sold required to hit number one is still at a very low level compared to even a few years ago. Although that low number is still around 30-50k, which I imagine will continue to defeat most download campaigns.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oh OK, that makes sense - hurrah for the Long Tail.

Even 30-50 is still up on the rock bottom of 20k which wasn't too long ago IIRC.

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

Just checked - Mika sold 77.5k last week; the no.2 sold 30k but you'd only have needed around 9k to go top 10.

Although the week Mika went to no. 1 he got there with 30k, and Leona the week before was 21k, so if you choose the right week it's still pretty low.