Huff & Puff

You have to marvel at the record industry (when are they going to change it to the MP3 industry or CD industry?) in their feeble attempts to breath some excitement into the whole business of current pop music. They've encouraged stories like. "The Arctic Monkeys could set a new chart record this weekend with 18 songs in the top 200 - a position not seen since the heyday of The Beatles." Sorry to have to inform them but there was no top 200 in the hey day of the Beatles. BBC News is even carrying the story. “the Arctic Monkeys are set to claim a new world record.” It’s rather like introducing a 141 meter race into athletics and someone claims a new record – it’s irrelevant.

It's all to do with the new rules that allow downloads to be counted towards the sales and therefore the chart positions. All 12 tracks from the Artic Monkeys new album are apparently being downloaded at such a fast rate that they are all set to claim an official chart position in the top 200. Of course no one tells us how many it takes to make it into the lower reaches of the top 100, let alone top 200. I suspect we're talking less than a thousand in the case of the top 200.