Remember the days when acts stayed at number one for more than a week? With Elvis at number for the fourth week running BMG are hoping to cut short his chart dominance by deleted the Junkie XL single today. The official line: "A Little Less Conversation has been used as the music behind Nike's World Cup television advertisement and without the World Cup or the TV campaign active at the moment, BMG have decided to delete the single”. The cynics claim that the release of BMG Pop Idol Gareth Gates’ second single today, and the need for young popstars to have the “every single went to number one” tag, might have come into play. Whether or not there’s any truth in the rumour we don’t know, but presumably when the remix of the true classic ‘Anyone of Us (Stupid Mistake)’ gets to number one in forty years time they’ll delete it as well so to make way for the runner up of Pop Idol 23’s fabulous new release.
And it seems the system is against Elvis in the US too. As reported in the CMU Daily on Friday the Nike tune has sold twice as many singles as its nearest competitor in America. Yet the single entered the Billboard chart at number 50 this weekend. The Billboard chart, like the Pepsi Chart in the UK, uses radio play as well as sales to compile its singles chart. In the UK the two main music charts – the UK Top 40 used by Radio 1 and the Pepsi Chart used by commercial radio – vary only slightly, with some singles appeared earlier in the Pepsi Chart (ie before retail release) due to high radio play on commercial stations around the UK. It seems, however, radio play has a bigger influence in the US so much so the record with by far the most sales doesn’t even feature in the crucial Top 40. With only 5 of the songs in the current Billboard Top 10 actually available in the shops some in the US are now questioning the way their main record chart is compiled, and, presumably, how in touch the radio stations are with the record buying public.