Official Charts

• 1. Introduction

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  The Official Charts Company decides what the UK's number one song is each week. That verdict ripples through radio playlists, streaming algorithms, record label contracts, and the careers of artists who may never know exactly how the count was made. The organisation compiling those numbers traces a lineage back to 1952, yet operates under rules that were still being rewritten as recently as 2024. How does a private company come to hold that kind of authority over popular music? And what happens when an old Kate Bush song tears its methodology apart?

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• 2. Before the Official Count

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  New Musical Express began its singles chart in 1952, more than a decade before any organisation claimed to produce a truly official tally. The NME chart and others like it were narrower in scope, drawing on a smaller pool of retailers and using cruder methods. Their data was incomplete by modern standards. Yet some of those earliest NME singles charts have since been absorbed into the Official Charts Company's own historical canon, recognised as the closest thing to a record that existed at the time.

  The British Market Research Bureau, known as BMRB, took over production of what were now called the official UK charts in 1969. That handover on the 3rd of August 1969 also marked the start of a chart week running Sunday to Saturday, a rhythm that would continue unchanged for nearly half a century. Gallup, Inc. stepped in for BMRB in 1983, continuing the work until a new organisation was ready to take over.

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• 3. Building the Machine

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  In 1990, the BBC, the British Association of Record Dealers, and the publishers of Music Week came together to form the Chart Information Network, abbreviated as CIN. That coalition handed CIN the contract to compile the UK's official charts, replacing Gallup. Four years later, in 1994, the organisation restructured and became what is now known as the Official Charts Company.

  The OCC is not a trade body in the usual sense. It is a private company limited by shares, jointly owned by the British Phonographic Industry and the Entertainment Retailers Association, which was itself formerly the British Association of Record Dealers. Those two bodies each send five representatives to a Chart Supervisory Committee, with the record industry seats filled by WMG, Sony Music, UMG, BMG Rights Management, and the PIAS Group. The committee meets roughly four times a year to settle any changes to the rules that govern the charts. That governance structure keeps competing commercial interests at the same table when the methodology shifts.

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• 4. Counting Every Sale

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  Market researchers Kantar gather and consolidate the raw sales data that feeds into OCC's charts each week. The company claims its data covers 99% of the UK singles market and 95% of the album market. Any retailer selling more than 100 chart items per week is a candidate for inclusion in that count.

  The UK charts cover singles, albums, and films, combining physical purchases, downloads, and streaming into a single figure. The charts publish every Friday night and cover the preceding Friday-to-Thursday period. That Friday publication date was itself a shift: from the 3rd of August 1969 until the 5th of July 2015, the chart week ran Sunday to Saturday. The change to a Friday release on the 10th of July 2015 was timed to coincide with the IFPI's New Music Friday Global Release Day campaign, which moved the global standard release date to Friday at the same moment.

  Beyond the headline singles and albums charts, the OCC publishes genre-specific tallies including the Official Dance Singles Chart Top 40, the Official Hip Hop and R&B Singles Chart Top 40, the Official Rock and Metal Singles Chart Top 40, the Official Progressive Albums Chart Top 30, and the Asian Music Chart Top 40, which it began compiling alongside BritAsia TV in mid-2019.

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• 5. The Streaming Problem

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  In May 2012, the OCC launched the Official Streaming Chart, the first of its kind to rank streams from both ad-funded and subscription services, pulling data from platforms including Spotify, Deezer, Blinkbox Music, and Napster. The chart publishes weekly on the OCC website and in the trade magazine Music Week.

  Folding streams into the main singles chart required a conversion ratio. Before January 2017, 100 streams counted as one sale. From January 2017 onward, the ratio tightened to 150 streams per sale, aiming to stop catalogue songs from accumulating streaming numbers so passively that they blocked newer releases. That same June, the committee added a further mechanism: after a track had spent at least 10 weeks on the chart and declined for three consecutive weeks, its ratio shifted to 300 streams per sale, accelerating its fall.

  The logic was tested hard in 2022, when Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" re-entered public consciousness through the fourth season of the Netflix series Stranger Things. The song had been a Top 3 hit 37 years earlier. Under the post-2017 rules, Bush's track needed twice the streams of Harry Styles' concurrent hit "As It Was" to earn the same chart points, despite being the most streamed and most downloaded song in the country at that moment. The Chart Supervisory Committee responded with what it called a manual reset, suspending the accelerated ratio for that song to reflect its genuine popularity.

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• 6. Borders and New Territories

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  The OCC's reach has moved beyond the United Kingdom in two distinct steps. In 2017, the company signed a five-year deal with the Irish Recorded Music Association, taking over compilation of the Irish Singles Chart, the Irish Albums Chart, and other Irish charts on IRMA's behalf.

  In December 2020, the OCC announced it had won the contract previously held by German company GfK to compile the French music charts for the Syndicat National de l'Edition Phonographique and the National Union of Phonographic Producers. The French contract took effect on the 1st of January 2021. Alongside those international charts, the OCC also publishes Scotland-specific and Wales-specific tallies: the Official Scottish Albums Chart Top 100 and, through the subscription UKChartsPlus newsletter, the Official UK Top 100 Welsh Singles and Albums Charts.

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• 7. Vinyl, Video and Awards

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  In April 2015, the OCC launched the UK's first vinyl record chart of the modern era, citing seven consecutive years of sector growth as the justification. The video side of the business tracks DVD and Blu-ray purchases as well as downloads of television programmes, films, and sports and fitness content. Those video charts still run on the original Sunday-to-Saturday week, even while the music charts shifted to Friday.

  The company has formalised its role as an arbiter of achievement through a growing awards programme. The Number One Award for singles arrived in December 2011, followed by a Number One Award for albums in 2015. The Specialist Number One Awards, launched in January 2021, recognise number ones across all OCC charts outside the main singles and albums tallies, covering any prior year. Most recently, in March 2024, the company introduced the Top 10 Award, given to artists achieving a top-ten entry on the Official Albums or Singles charts for the first time.

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