For the first time this year, we have a proper slate of new entries!  Not just one at the top and a few stragglers outside the top 30!  And with a couple of exceptions, they’re a fairly interesting bunch.

But despite facing a proper challenge for once, the number 1 single is, for the third week, “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye ft Kimbra.

It’s still selling 85,000 copies a week, after nine weeks out, and it’s comfortably the biggest single of the year so far.  And as of right now, it’s still at the top of the iTunes chart, with no real challenge from this week’s new releases.  Could be around a while.

On to this week’s seven new entries, almost all of which are worth a bit of attention.

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This is the annual post-Brit Awards chart, in which, as is by now traditional, the general non-music-buying public are suddenly alerted to some records that have been out for ages, and they stumble zombie-like up the chart for a week.  Naturally, very few acts release major new singles in such a week, so once again, we’ve got the now familiar pattern of a moderately big release at the low end of the top 10, and some scattered new entries way down at the bottom of the chart.

But first, look who’s back at number one.

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If you were expecting the top ten to be full of Whitney Houston songs – well, think again.  The thing about artists like Whitney Houston is that they’ve made an awful lot of records.  In her case, she’s had 32 hits in a 24-year chart career.  And that means the posthumous downloads tend to be scattered among the big songs, so that they swamp the lower reaches rather than dominating top ten of the chart.

There are, of course, quite a few Whitney Houston songs on this week’s chart.  But right at the top, it’s business as usual, with regular new singles entering at 1 and 2.

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First things first: no, there aren’t any Whitney Houston songs on this chart.  The chart week runs from Sunday to Saturday, so all of the memorial sales will count towards the next chart.  In fact, judging from iTunes, it looks like the major impact will be sales of her greatest hits albums; I’m not expecting a deluge on the singles chart, though things could always change during the week.

The midweek chart showed “Titanium” by David Guetta staying at number one, but as it turns out, it didn’t quite hold on.  Instead, it slips to number two, and gets replaced by this:

“Somebody I Used to Know” by Gotye featuring Kimbra entered at number 36 four weeks ago and has been climbing steadily since.  I already covered it in the 15 January post, so go and read that if you want more on the artists.

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Don’t get too comfortable, this probably won’t take long.  It’s a week of almost total inactivity on the singles chart, at least where new entries are concerned.

We do, however, have a new number one, because “Twilight” by Cover Drive has dropped to 6 in its second week.  That should have left the way clear for the week’s only major chart-eligible new release, which was indeed at the top of the midweek chart – but as it turns out, sales tailed off in the second half.  (Madonna also released a new single last week, but because it’s being offered as an advance download for people pre-ordering her new album, and the chart compilers can’t tell the two types of purchase part, it’s not eligible to chart.)

The somewhat unexpected result is that our new number 1 is “Titanium” by David Guetta ft Sia.

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Time for another new number 1 single – and to judge from the iTunes chart, another one that’s likely to spend a single week at the top.  This time, it’s “Twilight” by Cover Drive, a Bajan group who like to style their music as “Cari-pop”.

Hey, guys, you couldn’t work some really incongruous product placement for the Mini into your video, could you?

Thanks.

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Well, I don’t much care for it, but what do I know?  “Domino” by Jessie J is number 1 for a second week, which must be heartening news for anyone who has money invested in Katy Perry’s next album.  It helps, of course, that the release schedules are still pretty quiet, so that she doesn’t have much competition.  Still, the last song to spend two weeks at the top was “We Found Love” by Rihanna back in November, so she must be doing something right.

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An odd week. The midweek charts were practically dead, with a scattering of new entries right at the bottom. All of them have picked up pace significantly in the second half of the week, presumably because radio is now returning to normal, and listeners are slowly picking up on the new songs that are entering rotation.

We also have a new number 1, as “Domino” by Jessie J climbs to the top on its third week.  Regular readers will have picked up that I’m rather underwhelmed by it. It’s catchy enough, I guess, but there’s something about Jessie J herself that I find rather unconvincing.  I feel like I’m watching a string of tried-and-tested ideas that she’s picked up from studying other artists, with no real soul holding it together.  If you fed a load of pop songs to a computer and told it to make more based on the patterns it could discern, it’d come up with something like Jessie J.  This month’s template: the complete works of Katy Perry.

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It’s always quiet in early January, since nobody starts promoting new singles until Christmas is comfortably behind them.  Things start to pick up a little this week, but it’s still not exactly a jam-packed chart.  With the Christmas novelty records also out of the way, that leaves the long-running hits from last year to trade places at the top of the chart.  Last week it was Coldplay.  This week, for some reason, it’s “Good Feeling” by Flo Rida, which came out in November and has been hanging around the top ten for eight weeks.

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This is the annual chart covering the dead week between Christmas and New Year, when no new records are released.  But that doesn’t mean it’s completely dormant.  The records that were being pushed specifically for Christmas week are all gone; the Christmas singles from the back catalogue have vanished too.  In their place are a handful of new entries, and a raft of re-entries sparked by “year in review” playlisting.

Perhaps surprisingly, given its titanic first-week sales, the Military Wives single didn’t manage a second week at the top.  That’s partly because its sales were front loaded into Christmas week, and also because its sales were overwhelming in physical format – meaning that it takes a particular hit from the shops being closed.  Instead, the surprise first number one of 2012 is “Paradise” by Coldplay, which came out in September.

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