there would surely be little surprise, look you see, in news that Liam Gallagher's debut solo album, As You Were, has made its own debut in the album chart at the toppermost of the poppermost positions. which means yes, to be sure, it went straight in at number one. as you do, i suppose, for it is a really good album.
during the week the aptly named "midweek chart update" indicated that this record was outselling the rest of the top twenty albums combined.i believe by the end, which is to say the cut off time for chart calculations, this was down to outselling just the rest of the top ten combined, but still. most impressive.
many thanks indeed to them at the BBC what put the visuals together so that i can present the above illustration. and as i paid for the BBC to pay to do that via the licence fee, oh yes i am allowed to do so, for i and everyone else who does the legal thing have paid to own whatever they do with our money.
is there some sort of moan or complaint, or if you like grumble, coming? oh yes, but wait. although of course it does involve those corruption of charts people, the Official Chart company.
the Official Charts company are most excited about Liam's success, celebrating 103,000 "sales". impressively, 91% (they say) of these "sales" are actual sales of physical records and digital downloads. some 16,000 copies of the album were sold this last week on vinyl alone.
in terms of this, then, Liam should also be charting quite well in the singles chart. after the fiasco of Ed Sheeran's Divide album dominating the singles chart they jiggled the system so that only three songs off an album could appear in the singles. i fully expected the first three singles released from As You Were, namely Wall Of Glass, Chinatown and For What It's Worth, to feature.
no, not one of them does rank in the top 40, despite the impressive sales and "sales" via streaming. i have included the top 13 here to show that Ed Sheeran still lingers with one of his "singles". yes, for the sake of it i checked the "rock" and "indie" charts, and Liam does not feature there. not that he would on the "indie", since Warner is not exactly what one would call a small label.
i refer those interested back to this blog post, then. it chronicles the death of the singles chart. whilst the Official Chart company promised to "fix" everything after that debacle, clearly they have not. by the same standards what was given to Ed Sheeran, and the measurements put in place since, over 100,000 sales of his album should have secured Liam at least one top 10 single too, if not the number one.
the frustration here is that the singles chart has been tarnished forever. artists prior to Ed Sheeran's "record setting" feat had no possible way of doing the same themselves. now, it seems, artists after the event, with a supposedly new and fairer system, cannot do it either. and so we are left with Ed Sheeran setting a chart record that no one else was able to do and no one else now can do.
probably not is the answer as to if i should really get all bothered about this kind of thing. but then maybe i should. the music charts belonged, in a sense, to all of us music lovers. it has been taken away from us for no particular reason beyond celebrating Ed Sheeran's success with singles that were never actually released as singles.
maybe i should take pen to paper and write to the Official Chart company.......
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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