This week: X Factor alumni fall slightly short of expectations, Voice contestant does rather better.  It’s Reality TV Show Tales!

39.  The Goo-Goo Dolls – “Iris” 
38.  John Legend – “Ordinary People”
37.  Disclosure featuring Sam Smith – “Latch”

Two of the now familiar perennials from reality TV, plus Disclosure, presumably because of the spillover effect from their album release.  This has become a routine phenomenon at the bottom end of the top 40, though with Britain’s Got Talent over for another year, things should quieten down.

22.  Kodaline – “Love Like This”

The follow-up to “High Hopes”, which made number 16 in March.  It’s basically Mumford & Sons with added AOR.

21.  Afrojack (featuring Chris Brown) – “As Your Friend”

Well, this is all very Calvin Harris, isn’t it?  It’s been a while since we’ve had anything quite this blatantly School Of Harris, in fact, though it does have a couple of bits where it veers into something less radio-friendly.  Not that those bits are necessarily an improvement.

Afrojack is Dutch DJ Nick van der Wall.  His previous biggest hit as a lead artist was “Take Over Control”, which made number 24 in 2010, but he also has a guest credit on “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull, a number 1 from 2011.

Chris Brown is Chris Brown, and I choose to pretend he isn’t happening.

16.  Leah McFall – “I Will Survive”

Ooh, now this is a surprise.

The Voice UK releases its performances on iTunes, just like X Factor does.  Unlike X Factor, it hasn’t exercised the option to exclude them from the chart.

Now, there’s a very good reason why X Factor opts out of the chart – it makes it blatantly obvious who’s winning the phone votes.  Here’s Leah McFall, making number 16 based on one day’s sales  – a pretty remarkable achievement.  None of the other contestants are anywhere to be found.  So much for tension, then.

But The Voice UK has its reasons for letting these tracks chart – principally, that season 1’s winner was a catastrophe, and they really need to establish that they’re capable of finding stars.  And if you’ve got a record that makes number 16 in one day, well, you’ve sent some kind of message that your show counts after all.

It’s continuing to sell, too – as of right now, the track remains in the iTunes top 10.  (It was at 3 on Sunday.)

The actual song is a drastically re-arranged version of Gloria Gaynor’s 1979 number 1 hit “I Will Survive”, and it’s the sort of thing that does very well on talent shows – which is to say, it’s as much a technical showreel as an actual performance.  It’s striking, though, so if the aim was to get people talking about her, job done.

7.  Fuse ODG – “Antenna”

Fuse ODG lives in London, but he’s Ghanaian by birth, and he’s been having hits over there for a couple of years now.  The ODG apparently stands for “Off Da Ground”, which was originally a collective of musicians.  His big hit abroad was 2011’s “Azonto”, which is rather more explicitly Afrobeat.  “Antenna” is more of a hybrid with UK pop-rap, but an interesting enough record for all that.

6.  Union J – “Carry You”

Union J came fourth in X Factor last year.  Like a lot of X Factor bands, they were kind of sort of assembled during the audition stages.  Three of them – Josh Cuthbert, JJ Hamblett and Jaymi Hensley – originally applied as a trio under the undeniably logical name Triple J.  Then they had a chap called George added, so… yeah.  Union J.

From the sound of this single, the record company fancy them as another Wanted.  That kind of makes sense, since One Direction have got their side of the boy band territory sewn up.  The Wanted, in comparison, are slight underachievers.  Unfortunately, the Wanted also tend to make slightly better records.  This is thoroughly okay, but it’s hard to see it having a massive appeal beyond their core fans.

Sales on this tailed off rather quickly beyond the first few days, which is not a good sign – I’m sure the record company expected it to at least be in contention for number 1.

1.  Robin Thicke (featuring T.I. and Pharrell Williams) – “Blurred Lines” 

Second week on top, and heading a virtually static top five.  Astonishingly, his sales actually went up, with 199,000 copies sold in the second week.  This thing is going to pass half a million in three weeks; it seems to be the summer of R&B throwbacks.

According to the Official Charts Company, this is the eighth straight week that the number 1 single has sold more than 100,000 copies.  If you discount charity singles, this hasn’t happened since 1999 (evidently a very different time, since the number 1 hits in that run included the largely forgotten “Lift Me Up” by Geri Halliwell, and “King of my Castle” by the Wamdue Project).

On the album chart, Daft Punk are surprisingly no longer number 1…

• “Settle” by Disclosure is number 1, following their string of hit singles.
  
• “Like Clockwork” by Queens of the Stone Age at 2, their highest placed album to date.  They’ve made number 4 twice, but that was a while back.
• “Don’t Forget Who You Are” by Miles Kane at 8.  The other one from Last Shadow Puppets.  This is his second solo album, and the first to make the top ten.
• “Super Collider” by Megadeth at 22.  Yes, 22.  That’s… really quite awful for a band of Megadeth’s status.
•  “The Hurry and the Harm” by City and Colour at 32.  City and Colour is Canadian songwriter Dallas Green, who used to be in Alexisonfire.  It’s his first album to make the chart.
• “Feel” by Sleeping with Sirens at 36.  An American post-hardcore band, making their first UK chart appearance too.
• “Desire Lines” by Camera Obscura at 39.  Glaswegian indie band who’ve been around for years.  Their previous album, 2009’s “My Maudlin Career”, made 32.