UK singles chart

[7][failed verification] A rival chart show, The Official Big Top 40, is broadcast on Sundays from 16:00 to 19:00 on Capital and Heart stations across the United Kingdom.

Record charts in the UK began in 1952, when Percy Dickins of the New Musical Express (NME) gathered a pool of 52 stores willing to report sales figures.

These results were then aggregated into a Top 12 chart[nb 1] published in NME on 14 November 1952, with Al Martino's "Here in My Heart" awarded the number-one position.

[14][16] Another rival publication, Melody Maker, began compiling its own chart; it telephoned 19 stores to produce a Top 20 for 7 April 1956.

[11] Retailer began independent auditing in January 1963, and is now used by the UK singles chart as the source for number-ones from the week ending 12 March 1960 onward.

[22] As of 14 January 2022, she is one of nine female solo artists to have topped the chart before their 18th birthday (though none of these nine acts wrote their number one hit single-handedly, with that honour falling to 19-year-old Kate Bush with "Wuthering Heights" in 1978).

[15] The Official Charts Company and their various Hit Singles books (whether published by Guinness/HiT Entertainment or Virgin), use as sources for the unofficial period, the NME before 10 March 1960 and Record Retailer until 1969.

The most widely circulated chart was the NME one, as used by Radio Luxembourg's Sunday night Top 20 show, as well as by ABC TV's Thank Your Lucky Stars, which had an audience of up to six million on ITV.

A computer then compiled the chart on Monday, and the BBC were informed of the Top 50 on Tuesday in time for it to be announced on Johnnie Walker's afternoon show.

A World in Action documentary exposé in 1980 also revealed corruption within the industry; stores' chart-returns dealers would frequently be offered bribes to falsify sales logs.

[11][14] Later in the year, the rules about the kind of free gifts that could come with singles were tightened, as the chart compilers came to the conclusion that a lot of consumers were buying certain releases for the T-shirts that came with them and not the actual record (stickers were also banned).

In July 1987, Gallup signed a new agreement with the BPI, increasing the sample size to approximately 500 stores and introducing barcode scanners to read data.

[37] The chart was based entirely on sales of vinyl single records from retail outlets and announced on Tuesday until October 1987, when the Top 40 was revealed each Sunday (due to the new, automated process).

[39] In May 1989, chart regulations kept Kylie Minogue's song "Hand on Your Heart" from entering at number one because sales from cassette singles were not included (they were sold for £1.99 – cheaper than allowed at the time).

[37] In January 1990, the BPI gave notice to Gallup, BBC and Music Week; on 30 June 1990, it terminated its contract with them because it "could no longer afford the £600,000 a year cost".

[46] In January 1991, the CIN became a joint venture between Link House Magazines (formerly Spotlight Publications, later Miller Freeman, Inc.)[47] and the BPI; they shared the revenue and costs (reportedly between £750,000 and £1 million).

)[53][54] The growth of dance music culture in the late 1980s had resulted in records with many remixes, though with a single only officially running to 20 minutes this meant that many of the European-style maxi-singles could not be included.

Due to this ruling, ambient duo the Orb were able to have a Top Ten hit with "Blue Room", a song that was three seconds short of 40 minutes.

[58] Gallup attempted to block Millward Brown's new chart by complaining to the Office of Fair Trading about the contractual clause in which BARD retailers exclusively supplied sales data to CIN, but the interim order was rejected.

[77] Some independent retailers lost access to the record-label-funded Electronic Record Ordering System (Eros); it was "too costly to make it Year 2000 compliant".

[78] Toward the end of the 1990s companies anticipated distributing singles over the Internet, following the example of Beggars Banquet and Liquid Audio (who made 2,000 tracks available for digital download in the US).

[citation needed] Initially, the British Association of Record Dealers was concerned that the popularity of downloading would siphon business from the High Street.

[citation needed] After pressure from elsewhere in the music industry a second compromise was reached in 2006, which now allowed singles to chart on downloads the week before their physical release.

"Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol returned at a Top 10 position (number 9, just three places below the peak it had reached the previous September), while "Honey to the Bee" by Billie Piper (following a tongue-in-cheek promotional push by Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles to test the new chart rules) reappeared at number 17 (nearly eight years after its original appearance on the charts).

[87] In October 2008, P!nk broke the 1982 chart record set by Captain Sensible's "Happy Talk"[88] for biggest Top 40 jump to number one, when "So What" vaulted from 38 to 1 (a statistic which was matched in 2022 by Adele).

[96] The final number one on the UK Singles Chart to be based on sales alone was "Gecko (Overdrive)" by Oliver Heldens featuring Becky Hill.

[1] On 24 December 2021, LadBaby secured their fourth Christmas No.1 in a row with "Sausage Rolls for Everyone", a comedy version of the preceding number one "Merry Christmas" by Ed Sheeran and Elton John (as they were credited by the OCC on the LadBaby version, Sheeran and John happened to be in positions 1 and 2, with these singles acquiring sales of 226,953 between 17 and 23 December 2021).

's "Last Christmas", for the track that has taken the longest time to reach Number 1 with "Running Up That Hill" first entering the chart in August 1985 and getting to the top 37 years later,[132][133] beating Wham!

[144][146][147] Bruno Brookes took over in 1986[148] and, in October 1987, automated data collection allowed the countdown to be announced on the Sunday chart show (instead of on Tuesdays).

From March 2010 Greg James hosted a half-hour show at 3:30 pm on Wednesdays, announcing a chart update based on midweek sales figures previously only available to the industry.