In January 2005, Elvis Presley claimed the UK Official Single Chart’s 1,000th No 1 single with “One Night,” nearly 28 years after his death. Shrewd promotion by his label had encouraged collectors to buy limited-edition reissues of his hits on CD and vinyl. Digital downloads had overtaken physical singles in weekly UK sales the previous month, and Apple announced its 250 millionth iTunes songs downloaded worldwide that January, yet downloads still didn’t count towards the charts. Speaking to The Independent that same month, former Top of the Pops producer Chris Cowey proclaimed a turning point: a No 1 is no longer “an accurate barometer of the popularity of songs among the public.”
While digital downloads were first included in the chart in April of 2005, more than two decades later we’re still grappling with this quandary. Just earlier this year, Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s record-breaking run at No 1 with “Rein Me In” was met with its own share of skepticism, as many people insisted they’d never heard it. Meanwhile, Ariana Grande’s “hate that i made you love me” spent just a week at No 1, yet went on to become Spotify’s most-streamed song of the summer globally. If a long reign doesn’t guarantee ubiquity, and a short one doesn’t rule out lasting success, what does having a No 1 actually mean?
First, a clarification: the phrase ‘No 1’ here refers to the UK Official Singles Chart, whose roots go back to 1952 when NME founder Percy Dickins phoned 20 record shops around the country to find out what was selling. As of today, it combines physical and digital sales with audio and video streams into a weekly ranking of 100 songs, reflecting what people bought and played in the previous week. Radio plays don’t count towards the UK Official Singles Chart, but they can influence listeners to go and buy, download or stream a record.
Part of the confusion over what a No 1 represents stems from how we consume media today. Pre-millenium, radio and television could raise a song to ubiquity even to people with little interest in the artist. But today’s age of streaming platforms and social media allows us to follow our own tastes, while countless other forms of entertainment compete for our attention. It’s become easier to miss what’s charting altogether, let alone what’s at No 1.
What we encounter repeatedly, and what we don’t, also shapes our sense of what’s popular. Psychologists call it the availability heuristic: we judge how popular something is by how easily examples come to mind, so hearing the same songs repeatedly in our feeds can make us assume everyone else knows it. Neither Charli XCX’s “Apple” nor “360” reached No 1 on the UK Official Singles Chart, though many would have assumed they did given how massive they were. The summer of 2024 was painted brat green regardless.
The reverse can be true of songs that do reach No 1. For example, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas”, which has now spent a record-breaking 23 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 – the States’ counterpart to the UK Singles Chart – yet seems to have barely registered for many commenters online. “There’s always a gap between what’s loud online and what people are actually listening to,” says Matt Kent, a pop editor at Spotify, pointing to a mismatch between online discourse and the reality of streaming figures. Roughly two-thirds of streams for a track like “Choosin’ Texas”, Kent explains, comes from people choosing to listen – by actively searching for it or playing it from their own playlists – while streams driven by Spotify’s algorithm account for less than a third of the total. This illustrates the flipside of digital reality in which a song’s true popularity can be obscured in your own algorithmic echo chamber.
Next, we arrive at the elephant in the room: how much of a No 1 reflects genuine popularity, versus the music industry’s ability to keep a song in circulation through covert means (like the Elvis Presley example above). Rob Copsey, a former editor at the Official Charts Company, explains how labels spot songs with staying power and double-down on their marketing efforts to maximise their reach. This support can take many forms, from TikTok promotion and television exposure to physical releases. Kent points to RAYE’s limited-edition coloured 7-inch vinyl pressings as helping “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” reach No 1. “That’s not gaming the system, it’s giving fans something tangible and special,” Copsey claims.
But while collectible releases and coordinated fan streaming can lift a chart position temporarily, sustaining it is another matter entirely – and reaching No 1 is never guaranteed. Luke Neville, co-founder of London-based promotions company Listen Up, worked on ANOTR’s “Talk To You,” released in March this year. “It really flew on social media. The boys were playing it at all their gigs for ages before it went to the DSPs and radio,” he says. “We work it through specialist radio first, so you get Danny Howard or Pete Tong playing it, and it builds out from there, hopefully through to daytime rotation.”
By summer, the song had become a hit and even reached the England team’s World Cup dressing room – but, crucially, it fell just short of No 1, instead peaking at No 3 in July. “If there hadn’t been so many other bigger records around, it could have got to No 1. Sometimes, you need more than just radio or a great record to get to No 1,” says Neville. A song can enjoy all the telltale signs of success and still be overtaken by an Oasis track enjoying a resurgence.
Equally, a song can go straight to No 1 because an artist’s fans rush to buy and stream it, or get there gradually as more people discover it over several months. Both earn the same title, but should we read them as the same kind of success? “Intensity of engagement and breadth of engagement are very different things, and the chart has to accommodate both,” says Copsey. For instance, Grande’s “hate that i made you love me” held the No 1 spot for just one week, while its global Spotify success – a measure of listening over several months – reveals a scale of listening that its brief UK reign alone cannot capture. Would “hate that i made you love me”’s streams have suffered if the track hadn’t debuted at No 1? It seems unlikely.
For artists, the ranking still carries weight, both emotionally and commercially. Copsey explains how chart successes often help artists secure venues and pitch for television appearances, though he now describes it as “a nice-to-have”, rather than an necessity. Neville calls it “kudos,” while Kent sees the accolade as part of a bigger picture that includes fans buying tickets and consistently listening. No 1 still matters, but while it still has some authority as an industry accolade, its claim to represent a shared culture is less clear.
Perhaps both the milestone’s appeal and our doubts about it come partly from nostalgia for a time when everybody seemed to know the same songs. Many of us have since drifted away from the Top 40, but still expect its biggest hits to feel as familiar as they did growing up. The common ground once represented by a national No 1 hasn’t necessarily disappeared, but rather splintered into smaller communities, friendship groups and households, each with hits of their own. Surprisingly, in my house that No 1 happens to be “Rein Me In,” judging by how often my dad asks me to play “that Olivia Dean Song” one more time. Someone out there is probably still wondering who on earth is listening to it.
