In a nutshell:
Commercial radio chart Hit40UK has announced it is ditching CD sales from its official figures.
The weekly singles chart, which broadcasts across 130 stations, is to be based solely on digital downloads from this weekend.
Interesting to think of the charts as a measure of public taste bearing this news in mind – is it not time to do away with them altogether? The official charts obviously do not measure illegal downloads, which is a huge source of tunes for those more involved ‘music aficionados’ for the want of a better term as opposed to the more casual, single buying fan. But then again was this not always the case – were kids in the 80s and 90s not swapping tapes of the latest darlings of Melody Maker?
Furthermore what does this mean for the album chart? If one were to download an album from iTunes does the system recognise it as 1 unit sold or count it as 10 or so singles sold?
