Who'd have thought the world of music charts could get so damn complicated? The Official Charts Company seem to be announcing refinements every week these days.
The latest chart news is that a brand new chart is to be launched that will track what music has been most played via music subscription services like Napster, MSN's Music Box, Vodafone/Omnifone's soon-to-launch MusicStation thing and the mentioned-in-a-minute Nokia subscription service. Music accessed via these services on a subscription basis (rather than an iTunes style pay per download model) are not currently included in either the download or main singles charts. The new chart will launch later this year once chart bosses are confident the data supplied to them by subscription services is "robust" enough.
OCC top man Martin Talbot says this: "The launch of The Official Plays Chart will provide valuable visibility to subscription-based models, about which there is great excitement within the business and which are expected to play an increasingly significant part in consumers' music consumption over the coming 12 months and more. The role of the Official Charts Company is to reflect the development of the entertainment business, both in tracking all sales, and providing detailed industry data on the evolution of the industry; this new data service is a prime example of this".
The boss of the new Omnifone/MusicStation service, Rob Lewis, welcomed the new chart, telling us: "MusicStation applauds the Official Charts Company's decision to launch the Official Plays Chart, a decision which acknowledges the changes sweeping the music industry, and in particular the increasing importance of the unlimited music download model. We believe the new chart will offer consumers an entirely new insight into the popularity of music, showing what people are actually listening to the most each week, not what they have recently purchased".