Welcome to the brave new technological frontier – the first chart of the streaming era!  And what changes do we see?  Um, not very much.  Because the chart is still heavily weighted towards sales, you’re not going to see things charting on streaming alone – and besides, the streaming chart lags behind the sales chart anyway.  Frankly, the only noticeable impact this week is that some older tracks still hanging around the streaming chart (like “Rather Be”) rebound.  But hey, let’s see what else we have.

39.  The Vamps – “Somebody to You”

Another product of the Swedish songwriting factories, which wouldn’t have been out of place on a Taylor Swift album.  This is charting as an album track, but it’ll vault into the top 10 next week thanks to the release of the single version (at which point it will sprout a “featuring Demi Lovato” credit).  Currently, it spoils the boy band’s clean record of top 10 hits.  That won’t last.

32.  Milky Chance – “Stolen Dance”

Milky Chance are a German folktronica duo – well, you’d have to speak English as a second language to think “Milky Chance” was in any way a good band name, wouldn’t you?  Native speakers wishing to enjoy the pleasant-enough riff must also wrestle with earnest lyrics like “Coldest winter for me / No sun is shining anymore / The only thing I feel is pain / Caused by absence of you”.  (To say nothing of “Do the boogie all night long”.)

This track has been doing the rounds on YouTube for a year now, and typically enough, finally gets its UK release long after it was a hit internationally.  Normally that implies a long period of pre-release hype, with the track reaching its highest place in week one, but since this is climbing the iTunes chart, it seems Britain is just taking a little longer to catch on.

23.  5 Seconds of Summer – “She Looks So Perfect”

You may remember this from the tail end of March, when it spent a week at number 1.  It rebounds 14 places this week, but that has nothing to do with the streaming data (it’s at 32 over on the streaming chart).  It seems that promotion for the release of the parent album – which enters at number 1 – has simply reminded some people that they wanted it, even though another two singles have come and gone since then.

10.  DJ Fresh vs TC – “Make U Bounce”

DJ Fresh at his most Calvin Harris.  Well, up to the chorus, at least.  As with the previous single, the co-credit actually reflects the fact that this is a re-working of somebody else’s track – in this case, an unreleased drum and bass track of the same name.  The uncredited singer is Little Nikki, who’s had a few singles fail to reach the top 40, and was also a member of a failed girl group called SoundGirl.

6.  Sia – “Chandelier”

If you haven’t seen the video, watch it.  I’ll wait.

Okay.  So, Sia Furler.  She cropped up as a guest singer on three singles during 2011-2012, the best known being David Guetta’s number 1 “Titanium”.  (The others were Guetta’s “She-Wolf” and Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones”.) But this is her first hit in her own right since way back in 2000, when she got to number 10 with “Taken for Granted”.  Her performing career never really took off after that, and although she’s made five albums, she’s had most success as a songwriter for the A-list stars.  And then “Titanium” came out and reminded everyone about her.  Which in turn means her upcoming sixth album is actually getting some promotion.

The promotional angle for this album is anonymity.  Sia’s face is being kept out of all promotional material, and the idea is that she’ll be represented instead by other people wearing Sia wigs.  Hence, in this video, mini-Sia – 11-year-old Maddie Ziegler, previously best known from the reality show Dance Moms, but whose career has just been given a rocket launch by this video.  She’s spectacularly good.

The official line is that Sia just doesn’t like being famous.  No doubt that’s true to a large extent, and it’s also the case that she stopped touring years ago, citing health reasons.  But there’s no secret about what she looks like, and it’s not like she’s obscuring her face in public.  (And she does still do conventional performances for charity shows.)  So the “faceless” angle is clearly more than that; it seems to be verging on a dadaist subversion of the whole idea of promotional appearances.  Hence an appearance on the Ellen deGeneres show where Maddie performed the dance routine while Sia stood in the corner with her back to the camera, and another on Late Night With Seth Meyers got Lena Dunham dancing in a Sia wig while the actual Sia lay face down on a bunk bed.  This is singularly bizarre, and thus infinitely more memorable than any conventional performance was ever likely to be – as well as sending the tacit message that Sia as artist in her own right is not just a jobbing songwriter who knocks out hits for David Guetta.

1.  Ariana Grande featuring Iggy Azalea – “Problem”

Back to the weekly turnover of number 1 hits, then.  Grande was in the Nickelodeon shows Victorious and Sam & Cat; but we know she isn’t number one on the strength of a fan base from those shows, since this is the lead single from her second album.  The first album was released in this country, but none of the singles made the top 40.  So as far as the average UK buyer is concerned, she’s new to them.  Iggy Azalea’s name probably helps a bit – each of her singles has done better than the last, peaking at 17, 13, 10, 5, and now 1.

But mostly, it’s simply that “Problem” is a high-end Max Martin production job.  Not that the format is exactly groundbreaking here – distorted brass riff, vocal hook based on repeating a single phrase…  Okay, they’ve jazzed up the verses a bit, but it is basically the Jason Derulo formula that Brett Domino helpfully explicates here:

(By an odd coincidence, he also has a follow-up video explaining how to make an Iggy Azalea record…)

Over on the album chart!

• “X” by Ed Sheeran remains at number 1 for a second week.
• “5 Seconds of Summer” by 5 Seconds of Summer at 2.  We’ve mentioned the single.
• “Wanted on Voyage” by George Ezra at 3.  The single “Budapest” climbs to 3 this week.
• “Mutineers” by David Gray at 10.  I saw this guy when he was a support act for the Auteurs.  Now there was a mismatch.  He hasn’t been on the singles chart in seven years but his albums still do decently.  Single: “Back in the World”.
• “Revival” by Bellowhead at 12.  A folk band specialising in slightly eccentric arrangements of things like sea shanties.  Their fifth album, and the highest place to date.  No videos for this, but there’s a general album teaser.
• “You Raise Me Up” by John Barrowman at 16.  That’s a lot of ironic purchases from Doctor Who fans.  Album teaser video here.  Experience snippets of John Barrowman singing “Take The High Road”!
• “Trigga” by Trey Songz at 17.  The single “Na Na” got to number 20 in March.
• “Monty Python Sings (Again)” by Monty Python’s Flying Circus at 35 – a remastered version (hence “Again”), promoting the reunion shows.  This compilation thus makes its first appearance in the top 40, though they’ve had four previous charting albums (the highest, surprisingly, was “Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album”), and “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” inexplicably got to number 3 in 1991.