Short history of the UK music charts
The UK chart has evolved from a handful of record-shop owners reporting sales by telephone in 1952 into a nationwide, data-driven system monitoring millions of legitimate music purchases and streams every week. The methodology has continually changed alongside the way people consume music, while retaining the fundamental purpose of measuring what music is most popular in the UK. Here is more detail on the evolution of the music charts in the UK.
The UK music charts began in November 1952, when New Musical Express (NME) created the first UK singles chart. Its compiler, Percy Dickins, gathered sales information by telephoning a small number of record shops and asking what records they had sold that week. The results were combined to produce the first chart. Al Martino's "Here in My Heart" became the first UK Number 1.
In 1969, the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), commissioned by the BBC and Record Retailer, took over compilation of the UK's official charts. Gallup became the chart compiler in 1983, followed by Millward Brown/Kantar in 1994. The Official Charts Company was established in 1998 and today commissions and manages the UK's Official Charts, with Kantar collecting and processing the underlying market data.
How the charts are compiled today
The modern Official Charts are based on a much larger and more sophisticated collection of data. Kantar receives information from more than 8,000 chart-reporting retailers and services, representing the vast majority of the UK music market. Data is collected throughout the chart week, which currently runs from 00:01 Friday to midnight Thursday for music.
The data covers music purchased or consumed through different formats, including physical sales such as CDs and vinyl, digital downloads and music streams. Streaming became part of the Official Singles Chart in 2014, while the Official Albums Chart incorporated audio streaming a year later in 2015. Video streams have also now been incorporated into the relevant charts.