While cylinders for Edison’s phonograph were the world’s first consumer music format in the late 1880s, the first music chart preceded them by around 50 years. Having originally represented sheet music sales, the music charts have tracked delivery formats through vinyl, cassette and CD to digital downloads.
Now, with music sales in a downward spiral, the UK’s first weekly vinyl chart has been launched.
It was in January 1936 that Billboard magazine published its first music hit parade in the US. And in 1942, the first gold record (marking 1,000,000 sales) was awarded to Glenn Miller for ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ – the same year that Bing Crosby claimed the best selling single of all time with ‘White Christmas’.
Across the Atlantic, the first UK record chart appeared in New Musical Express in 1952, after Percy Dickins contacted 20 retail shops for a list of their ten best-selling songs. The results provided the basis for a Top 12 chart published in NME on 14 November, with Al Martino’s ‘Here in My Heart’ in the No.1 position.
Based on the NME figures, Radio Luxembourg broadcast a chart throughout the 1960s – the first ever Top 20 countdown show – setting the format for the chart shows that followed. This was accompanied by the ITV TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars, which commanded an audience of up to six million at its height. The UK’s Top of the Pops chart TV show joined the party in 1964.
Before 1969 there was no official singles chart in the UK. Together, Record Retailer magazine and the BBC commissioned the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) to compile charts, beginning on 15 February. The BMRB compiled its first chart from postal returns of sales logs from 250 record shops.
In the heyday of commercially recorded music, it reflected just about every aspect of Western culture. The arrival of Compact Disc in 1982 blinded the music business to the threat posed by the unwitting coalition between computer gaming and cheap recording technology. Together, they simultaneously undermined the record industry and brought a new fascination to challenge its status. Even when alerted, the music business was so busy making money from reissues it failed to defend itself…
The brief confrontation between Sony’s MiniDisc and Philips/Matsushita’s Digital Compact Cassette that flared up in 1992 only served to further destabilise record sales. After selling only 50,000 MD players on release, Sony rashly declared 1998 was The Year of the MiniDisc when research showed 75% of Americans had never heard of it. The arrival of the iPod in October 2001 made music files the new currency – unless you were a DJ, you carried your music in your pocket.
By 2005, the charts had become more a measure of the decline in music sales than their success. In an attempt to bolster figures and acknowledge new models of music distribution, paid downloads brought sales from digital music retailers such as Rhapsody, AmazonMP3, and iTunes to the Billboard charts. These were joined by YouTube video streaming data in 2013. Also in 2013, on-demand streams were included in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gold and platinum sales certification.
At the moment, the digital music spotlight is on Pono and Tidal. Offering two million titles, Neil Young’s Pono is an attempt to restore sound quality to consumer audio. As ‘the first artist-owned platform for music and video’, Jay Z’s Tidal global streaming music service has the backing of Chris Martin and Rihanna, among others, in its attempt to challenge the royalties system operated by Spotify. All of them claim to be working in the interests of the greater music business
Step back in time…
The move from vinyl to digital delivery technologies follows the curve of music sales’ decline. As gaming replaced youth’s music addiction, we increasingly accepted lower standards of sound reproduction. If it wasn’t the MP3 coding that emasculated a song, it was the system it was played on. The adrenaline release that once accompanied the surface noise of vinyl before the first track was gone. Now only the bass and SPL of a live gig could provoke a chemical reaction to compete with a first person shooter.
Available figures have it that just over 780,000 vinyl albums were sold in 2013 – the greatest since 817,000 were sold in 1997 – representing a 101% rise on 2012 sales. Stats released by the British Phonographic Industry also showed CD album sales down 19.5% year-on-year, with 69.4 million albums sold. Jack White’s Blunderbuss was the top-selling vinyl LP, with nearly 34,000. CD sales, meanwhile, continued to decline, dropping 13.5% to 193.4 million. And while 270 albums sold on MiniDisc in the UK in 2012, sales of cassette singles almost tripled to 604 copies.
It is an irony that live DJs have done as much to help keep vinyl alive as audiophile record collectors. They were buying very different music via very different channels, and they would have struggled to find common grounds for conversation, but they have turned out to be great allies. Now the UK’s first weekly vinyl chart has been launched by the Official Charts Company in response to ‘the huge surge of interest’ seen in vinyl sales in the UK – from a low of 0.1% of the albums market in 2007 (205,000) to 1.5% in 2014 (1.29m) – a 20-year high, following seven years of unbroken growth.
The move ties in with Record Store Day, and the expectation is that sales of vinyl albums are set to grow by another 70% cent this year. ‘Yes, it’s still a small part of the business,’ admitted Chief Executive Martin Talbot to the BBC. ‘But what makes this so unusual is that usually you see new formats arrive and grow in popularity, reach their peak and then decline and kind of disappear. We’ve seen specialist music shops start to stock more vinyl, we’ve seen fashion retailers start to stock vinyl, and there are now mail order services where you can get vinyl much more easily than maybe ten years ago.
‘This isn’t just about rock acts targeting men in their forties and fifties,’ he added. ‘I’ve got a 15-year-old daughter, and her friends have all started to collect vinyl.’
While a resurgent vinyl is never going to mount a challenge to downloads, there is something uniquely enduring about it. To some, it is because it’s analogue. To some, it’s the sound. To some, it’s the sleeve art. To some, it’s nostalgia. To some, it’s simple snobbery. And to others, it’s a means of rebelling against the control downloads give other people over the music they buy.
Although a record is iconic, it’s not as strong a visual icon as the cassette. While Cassette Store Day seeks to ride the success of Record Store Day, it is the image of the Compact Cassette that is genuinely enduring – and its ‘mixtape’ legacy. Recently, a mixtape provided a central theme to Marvel Studios’ film Guardians of the Galaxy. Not only did it ensure the film had a classic soundtrack, it prompted a cassette release of the soundtrack to affiliated retailers for last year’s Record Store Day. It sold more than 1,000 copies in the week of its release
When it was a current format, the cassette frightened the major record labels with its ability to deprive them of vinyl album royalties. Their over-protective view of the market prevented them from seeing how it was actually a user-funded promotional tool for their products. Their present desperation to control digital downloads suggest that they have learned little in the intervening 50 years.