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.
