In the summer of 1994, Wet Wet Wet set the record for the longest stint by a British act at the top of the UK singles chart. The Scottish band’s cover of Love Is All Around spent 15 weeks at number one after its inclusion on the Four Weddings and a Funeral soundtrack, and it became a must-listen song for millions. In the more than three decades since, it appeared to be an unbreakable record: everyone from Oasis and Coldplay to Adele and Ed Sheeran failed to dislodge it from its perch.
Until this month, that is. The crown has now passed to Sam Fender and Olivia Dean for Rein Me In, their duet that went viral after they performed it together at his London Stadium show last year. This week, with the song at the top of the chart for the 18th week, Fender and Dean have also leapfrogged Bryan Adams’s (Everything I Do) I Do It For You.
As brilliant as Fender and Dean are as young singer-songwriters, and through no fault of their own, the fact that they now hold this record suggests that topping the charts isn’t what it once was. Their version of Rein Me In, which was originally sung only by Fender as the eighth track on his third album, People Watching, was released in June last year, debuted at number 86, and did not reach the top of the charts until February. Since then, it has yo-yoed between first and fourth on the weekly chart.
Unlike the songs it has overtaken in the past few weeks, it has never exactly felt central to Britain’s music-listening culture.
Will Page, formerly the chief economist at Spotify, tells me that the modern fragmentation of both what people listen to and how they listen to it means there is a “sea of niches” that leads to “hits that are not actual, universal hits”.
The music industry has been upended by the almost wholesale replacement of physical record sales with streaming and digital downloads, and this technological revolution has forced compilers of the charts to change how the rankings are determined.
While it was relatively simple to count physical sales one at a time and come up with a definitive chart, as was the case when they started in the pages of the New Musical Express during the 1950s, it is now much messier. So today, 100 “premium streams” (from paying Spotify subscribers, say) or 600 free streams (on platforms such as YouTube) are the equivalent of one sale, according to the Official Charts Company.
Page says that the current rules “don’t make sense” and that having a formula that converts streams into a number of physical sales is like talking about “fax-equivalent emails: you’re converting the future into the past”.
This change to listening habits and chart methodology allows a track like Rein Me In to break records. “That’s going to be the biggest number one of all time,” says Alex Hardee, a live agent at The Team who looks after the likes of Liam Gallagher and Lewis Capaldi. “I don’t know if it’ll be remembered as one of the greatest songs of all time… I don’t know if you’re going to talk about it in the same breath as Bohemian Rhapsody or Bryan Adams... It’s not anything against that song. It hasn’t made a cultural impact, and it’s very hard to.”
The charts used to really matter. Think about the cultural phenomenon that was Oasis vs Blur in the summer of 1995 (when the latter’s Country House beat Roll With It to number one), or the groundswell of anti-Simon Cowell feeling when Rage Against the Machine topped the charts at Christmas instead of 2009’s The X Factor winner, Joe McElderry.
Now, however, news about who tops the charts is more likely to be greeted with a shrug. It’s a sad irony that this month marks the UK Official Albums Chart’s 70th birthday. Instances when there is widespread attention on the rankings – such as when Stranger Things fans boosted Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill in 2022 – are noticeable for their rarity. Young listeners are much more likely to get new music recommendations from algorithms than from the charts show each Friday on Radio 1. And, of course, it has been 20 years since Top of the Pops ceased to be broadcast.
If the way the singles chart is compiled is complex, the methodology behind the album rankings is even more so. Plays for the 16 most-streamed tracks from any given album are divided by 1,000 to create an “album stream” unit, which is then counted as being equivalent to one sale. “If I said to you, ‘How many stream-equivalent albums have you listened to this week?’” says Page. “You’d call me a fool.” The Official Charts Company was approached for comment.
Take a look at the album chart in any given week and you will see many of the same names cropping up time after time. You can be almost certain of finding the likes of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood Mac and Ed Sheeran in the top 20 in any given week – nostalgia rules all.
Robbie Williams caused a stir in January when Britpop, his latest album, went to number one; this 16th triumph meant that he surged past the Beatles to become the artist with the most UK chart-topping albums in history. (The Rolling Stones have since joined the Fab Four on 15 number one albums with the recent release of Foreign Tongues.)
A staggering 96 per cent of the weighting for Williams’s record-breaking number one was said to have come from physical sales, with the rest made up of streams and downloads. It shows how important fans going out and buying vinyl or CDs is to getting their favourite artist to the top – and how vital record labels’ marketing campaigns and pre-sales can be.
Some cynics reckoned that Taylor Swift released 27 different physical versions of The Life of a Showgirl last year knowing that her most devoted followers would snap up as many as they could, thus giving her a chance of breaking Adele’s record for the most “album units” sold in a single week. Despite Swift’s album underwhelming critics, she duly surpassed Adele’s benchmark.
But Adele’s 25, released in 2015, seemed like a genuine cultural moment: millions bought it on CD, and its hit songs, whether Hello or When We Were Young, were played constantly on the radio and could not be escaped. By comparison, Swift’s album failed to make much of a dent, and none of its singles really cut through to the everyman listener.
Hardee says that “album charts are even worse [than the singles chart] because you can manipulate them”, while another source adds: “When you have rules, a chart’s easier to rig.” If true, this is hardly a new development: ITV’s World in Action famously covered the manipulation of the charts, with labels giving free gifts to record stores in exchange for reporting artificially inflated sales figures.
A senior record executive rejects the claim that labels “game” the charts, but acknowledges that they think about “marketing tactics” in their attempts to boost their artists’ prospects. (Williams himself confirmed that his team delayed the release of Britpop to avoid it clashing with Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, because they knew it could never compete for the top spot.)
How much does topping the charts matter today, really? Page says that he was always told that “charts make the popular visible and the visible more popular. That’s the purpose they serve. They reinforce visibility. They reinforce, therefore, popularity”. That has changed, however, with the charts being neither “that visible nor that popular” today.
“I don’t think getting to number one moves the dial any more,” he adds. “I think there are other metrics, like the view count on YouTube, that people get.”
Having moribund official charts is not confined to the UK. This week in America, country singer-songwriter Ella Langley matched a record previously held by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey for the only singles by solo women to spend 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Her hit Choosin’ Texas has drawn level with I Will Always Love You, statistically at least. Whether many critics would put those songs on a par with one another is debatable.
Still, there are advocates for the charts. “From a philosophical point of view,” says the record executive, “in a world where there are 180,000 tracks uploaded every day, and there’s a lot of AI slop and AI fakes flooding these streaming services, to have that kind of cut-through that celebrates human artistry is a great thing.”
The Official Charts Company is jointly owned by the British Phonographic Industry, the trade body for record labels, and the Entertainment Retailers’ Association. It suits all parties to at least pretend that the charts are still relevant.
A report commissioned by the compilers in 2023 found that the charts had an “overwhelmingly young audience” and that almost three quarters of under-25s used them as their primary way of discovering new music.
But there is a sense in the music world that the charts have become something only executives – rather than listeners – care about. “It’s not a consumer-facing proposition in the same way as it once was,” says Page. “It’s an industry-facing proposition. When the industry obsesses about something the consumer doesn’t care about, usually things have gone a little bit off the tracks.” That said, he reckons if the charts didn’t exist, “you’d probably have to create them” because our need to rank things is hard to suppress.
Might Spotify streaming numbers – or its annual viral “Wrapped” feature, where users are informed of their most-listened-to songs, artists and genres – or YouTube view counts be a better measure of success? “I don’t know how to solve it, but it doesn’t feel real when you look at the charts,” says Hardee. “Someone from the Sixties or Seventies is more likely to have a Top 10 album than someone who is starting out now.”
That said, he reckons that “most artists want a number one album, because they want to tell their mother or grandmother” about a triumph they might recognise. Fender and Dean will surely have done the same.
Having stayed at the top of the charts for the 18th week in a row, the pair have joined American singer Frankie Laine in an exclusive club: Rein Me In is now tied with his 1953 hit I Believe as the UK’s longest-running Number One single. If they retain the top spot next week, Fender and Dean’s song would officially become the undisputed most successful single in UK chart history. Will anybody notice?