The first radio countdown of the UK singles charts took place in November 1952, this week is the 70th anniversary. Beginning as a Top 12 listed in the pages of a music paper the first No.1 was Al Martino’s Here In My Heart, this week it’s Taylor Swift.

For decades the charts ruled. It provided a massive insight to what the rest of the country was listening to and would throw up artists you had never seen or heard of, pre social media this was a source of information that couldn’t be ignored. In the 1960s the charts moved to BBC Radio 1 where they remain to today. Everyone is listening to The Beatles and the dominance of pop music in British culture has never been so strong, families gather round to countdown the charts, predictions are made in playgrounds and the charts begin to be a reliable and safe weekly occurrence. By the 1970s The Charts have gone Official and by the 1980s they’re reporting on the weekly Top 100, allowing for more scrutinising over who has jumped 50 or dropped by 20. By the 90’s rules were being adjusted to make space for Dance tracks and the race for No.1 is paper worthy news. The Noughties saw downloads overtake physical sales and 2015 introduced streaming, music has gone digital. 

How the charts are formed has always been a topic of contention. The very first chart came from just 10 record shops reporting on their top sales of the week, following this Percy Dickins of NME gathered a pool of 52 record shops who take part in forming the weekly top sales list. Nowadays with streaming being the dominant way to listen to music, most young people wouldn’t think about buying a newly released single let alone a physical copy, the charts are formed of top sales combined with a certain amount of streams being equal to a stream. It’s not very accurate but nobody really cares that much, the charts don’t hold the relevance they used to, with so many musicians out there, genres blurring into each other and a much wider acceptance of different styles there isn’t the need to be concerned with what everyone else is listening to.

The Charts are for everybody but have been increasingly shaped by the listening habits of young people. This has been proved from Beatlemania to the dominance of talent show winners and the return of Kate Bush. There are marketing schemes, campaigns and legends who fight to control the weekly countdown but just like many of the habits of youth, really it’s unpredictable.