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Song chart UKThe UK charts started with the one published in "New Musical Express" (1952 - 1960), then the "Record Retailer" chart (1960 - 1969) and completed with the "The Official Charts Company" (since 1969). This slightly convoluted set was originally defined in "Guinness Book of British Hit Singles" and is different from that used, for example by the BBC, before 1969, as a result some songs that were announced as number ones (for example on the TV show "Top of the Pops") are listed differently here. This chart was found at //www.chartstats.com/ which used to be a good site for examining the UK charts (until the official chart company shut them down). Some entries have had to be corrected to bring them in line with Guiness. There are a number of other sites that provide UK chart information, however most are either restricted in access (such as //www.theofficialcharts.com/) and/or contain too many errors (such as //www.everyhit.com/). AttributesThe attributes we use from this data are:
artistThere are a wide range of ways to assign scores to artists in order to work out which artists are most significant. Here is one listing, of the top five artists of each decade within the UK chart. This has been calculated using a score that combines the position and the number of weeks in the charts.
If we want to compare artists across the years we need to remove the systematic bias that comes from the different chart sizes for different eras. We can do that by first ording all the songs by success within a given year and then using this order to define a score (for example assigning 1.0 to the number 1 song, 0.5 to the number 2 and so on).
nameA number of song titles have been hits for more than one artist. Here are the twenty titles that have spent the most weeks in the UK charts. Twenty four artists have had hits with songs called "Crazy"!
positionThe peak position that songs reached in the UK charts shows the expected smooth curve from number one to 100, in contrast to that displayed by the Billboard data. This suggests that the data has not been subjected to the same level of "fiddling" that the Billboard charts are. dateThe month in which a song first entered the UK chart. weeksThe number of weeks that the average song spends in the UK chart has changed quite dramatically over the years, from well above 10 weeks in the late 1960s to less than 4 in the mid 1990s. Again this is in contrast to the Billboard charts (where the average duration was increasing during the same period). We have no good idea why this should be. |