Just when I was thinking about the importance of The Charts to a Pop music fan @Mister X started a thread looking back at the Charts in which I have made a few comments http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/this-week-in-music-charts.7446/#post-54639 Now to show how important people thought they were in the U.K. lets remember "The Battle of Britpop". This is how it was reported at the time on the national TV news Knowing the format of the 30 minute news programme this was probably before the Sports News and to a music fan far more interesting. The "Battle" has its own Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britpop#"The_Battle_of_Britpop" Of course the real winners were the record companies. With 490000 CD Singles sold between the two bands in one week and a typical cost of £1.99 for a CD Single (the format of choice by 1995) that is almost £1 million in sales. Personally I think Pulp were a better "Britpop" band than either Blur or Oasis. Did the charts get such prominence in other countries ?
I just watched an episode on Netflix about pop music history and the "battle" was the topic. We had a few over the years but it was more like Lady Gaga vs Katy Perry and they only lasted a couple weeks.
I think Simon Cowell's shows (Pop Idol, X Factor, whatever the US equivalent was) spoilt the charts. While the Boyzone and the Spice Girls were manufactured groups (as were the Monkees years earlier) all the manufacturing was done behind the scenes and the first you knew about them was when they went into the charts. Any of those earlier groups also had far more longevity, probably because the record company wanted to maintain them rather than find a replacement. Although there were a few exceptions, many of the talent show artists were forgotten about nine months later. If anything the runners up like One Direction seemed to do better.
