Before 1969 there was no official singles chart. Before February 1969 - when the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) chart was established - there was no official chart or universally accepted supply. The company regards a choose period of the brand new Musical Express chart (solely from 1952 to 1960) and the Record Retailer chart from 1960 to 1969 as predecessors for the interval up to 11 February 1969, online Slots the place multiples of competing charts (none official) coexisted side by aspect.

The primary number one on the UK singles chart was "Here in My Heart" by Al Martino for the week ending 14 November 1952. As of the week ending 18 December 2025, the UK singles chart has had 1,445 different number one hits. The UK singles chart started to be compiled in 1952. In keeping with the Official Charts Company's statistics, as of 1 July 2012, 1,200 singles had topped the Official Singles Chart. The Official Chart, broadcast on BBC Radio 1 and previously MTV (Official UK Top 40), Free slots is the UK music industry's recognised official measure of singles and albums reputation because it's probably the most comprehensive analysis panel of its variety, today surveying over 15,000 retailers and digital providers daily, capturing 99.9% of all singles consumed in Britain across the week, Slots free and over 98% of albums.

Record Mirror began running a Top 5 album chart in July 1956; from November 1958 onward Melody Maker printed the top 10 albums. 7 inch EP and free slots online all singles needing to be underneath 20 minutes in size, as releases longer than 20 minutes would be classed as an album (with most longer EPs falling into the price range albums class). EPs taken out the listings between March 1960 - December 1967 (the info for the now 'Official' 1960s EP chart will be found within the Virgin Book of British Hit Singles).

The precise variety of chart-toppers is debatable as a result of profusion of competing charts from the 1950s to the 1980s, Free slots but the standard record used is that endorsed by the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and subsequently adopted by the Official Charts Company. Some media retailers only list the highest forty (such as the BBC, with their Radio 1 show following the lead of Casey Kasem's American Top 40 within the 1970s) or Free slots the highest seventy five (corresponding to Music Week journal, with all data in the top seventy five described as 'hits') of this record.

Following this, the BPI lowered the minimum worth for cassette singles to influence sales figures.

A World in Action documentary exposé in 1980 additionally revealed corruption inside the business; stores' chart-returns sellers would steadily be supplied bribes to falsify gross sales logs. The chart was primarily based completely on sales of vinyl single records from retail outlets and free online slots introduced on Tuesday till October 1987, when the highest 40 was revealed each Sunday (because of the new, automated process).

In July 1987, Gallup signed a brand new agreement with the BPI, increasing the sample dimension to roughly 500 shops and introducing barcode scanners to learn knowledge. In late 1991, the sample consisted of 500 shops scanning barcodes of all document sales into an Epson PX-four pc, and 650 other shops providing gross sales information by means of their own EPoS computerised tills.