Record Retailer

• 1. Introduction

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  Record Retailer was the only music trade newspaper serving the UK record industry from 1959 to 1972. For over a decade, every chart position, every sales figure, every listing that the British record business treated as gospel passed through its pages. How did a monthly newspaper founded in August 1959 become the official voice of the national chart? And what happened when its monopoly on that authority finally came to an end?

• 2. A Trade Paper Is Born

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  Roy Parker launched Record Retailer in August 1959 with a clear mandate: serve both the labels pressing records and the dealers selling them. The title expanded almost immediately after launch to Record Retailer and Music Industry News, a name that signalled its ambitions reached beyond any single corner of the business. Parker ran the paper from its founding until his death on the 27th of December 1964.

  At first the paper came out monthly, but the record industry was moving fast and monthly coverage was not keeping pace. With its issue of the 10th of March 1960, Record Retailer shifted to a weekly schedule and added something that would define its legacy: a chart showing the top 50 records by sales.

• 3. The Chart That Counted

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  For nearly a decade, no competing national chart existed with the reach or industry trust of Record Retailer's listings. The Official Charts Company, looking back from the present day, formally recognises the paper's listings as the official national chart for the period from 1960 until February 1969.

  That nine-year window matters because it spans the years when British pop music was reshaping itself, and the chart printed in Record Retailer was the number the industry, the broadcasters, and the dealers actually used. When a standardised UK chart was finally established through the British Market Research Bureau in February 1969, it inherited the authority that Record Retailer had built up week by week.

• 4. Name Changes and Final Years

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  On the 5th of October 1967 the paper dropped the extended title and returned to the plain name Record Retailer. By January 1971 the name shifted again, this time to Record and Tape Retailer, acknowledging that cassettes and reels were now a serious part of the market alongside vinyl.

  That final name lasted barely a year. On the 18th of March 1972 the publication was relaunched as Music Week, the title it continues to carry today as a trade magazine for the UK music industry.