Category Archives: UK charts

Taylor Swift equals Madonna’s record of 12 UK No 1 albums

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Swift now has joint highest number of chart-toppers for a female artist, as The Tortured Poets Department earns biggest opening week in seven years

Taylor Swift has tied with Madonna to become the female artist with the most UK No 1 albums, earning her twelfth chart-topper with the global phenomenon that is The Tortured Poets Department.

Swift also dominates this week’s singles chart, with three songs in the Top Five including a No 1 for Fortnight, featuring Post Malone. It’s her fourth No 1 single, and her third chart double.

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Wham!’s Last Christmas finally reaches Christmas No 1, 39 years after release

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‘Mission accomplished!’ says Andrew Ridgeley, while Cher becomes oldest woman to score a UK Top 40 hit

Wham! have finally earned a Christmas No 1 for Last Christmas, 39 years after the song was denied the festive top spot by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?.

With the song’s pain and poignancy still undimmed thanks to the tangibly heartbroken performance of the late George Michael, it was streamed 13.3m times this week, and was helped along by special vinyl and CD editions.

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UK’s top 10 singles of 2022 were all by British artists

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A clean sweep led by Harry Styles was an ‘astonishing’ high note for the music industry – but the domination of older songs reflected the impact of streaming

For the first time since year-end charts were introduced more than 50 years ago, British artists have made up the entirety of the year’s 10 most popular songs in the UK.

Topping the biggest songs of 2022 in the UK was Harry Styles’ omnipresent As It Was; Ed Sheeran had two songs on the list, while new artists such as south London songwriter Cat Burns and Scottish dance duo LF System rubbed shoulders with Kate Bush, whose 1985 single Running Up That Hill topped the UK singles chart for the first time last year after being featured in the latest series of Netflix drama Stranger Things, having originally peaked at No 3.

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Kate Bush earns first ever US Top 10 hit with Running Up That Hill

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Song reaches No 8 in the US 37 years after it was first released, thanks to inclusion in new season of Stranger Things

Kate Bush has earned her first ever US Top 10 hit with Running Up That Hill, 37 years after it was released.

The song is a key plot point in the new series of Netflix’s supernatural drama Stranger Things, and has exploded in popularity since the show debuted on 27 May. It is now at No 8 in the US, and reached the same position in the UK singles chart last Friday.

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Crazy Frog returns, like it or not: ‘There will always be a place for novelty songs’

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With genitalia proudly exposed, the amphibian raced up the charts in 2005 and irritated much of the UK. Why has it been allowed a second chance? Its handler explains himself

For a few months in 2005, you couldn’t move without encountering Crazy Frog. First sold as a ringtone, his nonsensical catchphrase, “Rring ding ding ding baa baa”, entered the national vocabulary. Then it became the most popular – and divisive – single of 2005, coupled with a CGI video of an explicitly naked frog on the lam in a futuristic cityscape. “The frog is irritating to the point of distraction and back again,” wrote BBC News. “And yet at the same, it’s strangely compelling.”

The craze lasted for five Top 20 hits and then mercifully dwindled. The character was so hated that hackers found success with a virus offering to show users an image of him being killed off. But now the frog is staging a comeback. Next month, the once-ubiquitous amphibian will release a new single – a mash-up of a classic and a more recent song, the details of which the frog’s guardians are keeping under wraps, other than to say that both are popular on TikTok.

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Adele’s 30 becomes biggest-selling album of 2021 in US after three days

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Album also outselling rest of UK Top 40 combined, while Taylor Swift’s All Too Well (Taylor’s Version) becomes longest song to reach US No 1

Adele’s 30 is already the biggest-selling album of the year in the US, just three days after it went on sale.

Using a metric that combines sales of vinyl, CDs and downloads alongside streaming, 30 has sold over 575,000 copies. Adele has overtaken the previous highest seller Taylor Swift, whose December 2020 album Evermore has sold 462,000 copies this year.

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‘It’s currently 1991’: why old Top of the Pops reruns continue to enchant

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Fifteen years after it was axed, the iconic show is drawing in nostalgia junkies by offering eclectic music, dodgy lip-syncing ... and lockdown escapism

For many of us, it was the soundtrack to our childhood. The opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love still inspires an atavistic excitement in full-grown adults decades on. On Thursday – and later Friday – evenings, warbling singers and preening boybands would be beamed into homes across the nation as we waited to see which artist would take that week’s coveted No 1 spot. But in 2006, after years of falling ratings, Top of the Pops was cancelled. As music and TV streaming fractured our collective viewing habits, the singles chart started to feel like an irrelevance and, therefore, so did TOTP.

Related: In sync: how the mime-ban stripped Top of the Pops of its charm

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How did Bad Bunny become the world’s biggest pop star?

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The superb Puerto Rican vocalist is now the most streamed artist on Spotify globally, but has never had a UK hit – something he’s determined to change

Each December, Spotify announces who has been the world’s most streamed artist that year, and this generally tallies with who has been popular in the UK. Drake, the Canadian rapper who has had six UK No 1 singles, was first in three of the previous five years, with fellow UK chart-toppers Ed Sheeran and Post Malone leading the others.

But in 2020, someone who has never had an album or solo single in the UK Top 100 is the world’s most popular artist: 26-year-old Puerto Rican vocalist Bad Bunny, streamed more than 8.3bn times this year on Spotify alone. Granted, he has featured on one UK Top 10 hit, but that was back in 2018, appearing on it for less than a minute: Cardi B’s I Like It. He appears nowhere in Spotify’s 50 most-played songs in the UK today, with Brits preferring Christmas classics and Gen Z pop stars such as Billie Eilish, Internet Money and 24kGoldn. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny’s current (and superb) single Dakiti is the most-played in the world at time of writing, earning more than 7m plays each day, 3m more than Ariana Grande’s Positions in second place.

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