{"id":166,"date":"2010-01-04T20:28:02","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T20:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=166"},"modified":"2010-01-04T20:28:02","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T20:28:02","slug":"number-1s-of-2010-3-january-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=166","title":{"rendered":"Number 1s of 2010: 3 January 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the race for Christmas Number 1 over, and the country still on holiday, the week between Christmas and New Year is traditionally a dead one, so far as the charts are concerned.\u00a0 It’s not so much that you can’t buy records – the vast majority of singles are now sold as downloads, so it makes no difference that the shops are closed on public holidays.\u00a0 It’s more that radio and TV aren’t very interested in new music at this time of year, so it’s a bad time to release singles.\u00a0 Occasionally a band with a loyal fanbase try to take advantage of the lull to snatch a number one, but not this year.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, we do have a change at the top, as the Christmas number one contenders have flared out rather more quickly than you might expect.\u00a0 And so this week’s number one is…<\/p>\n

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…“Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga<\/strong>, which was already number one three weeks ago.\u00a0 It spent the last two weeks at number 3, behind Joe McElderry and Rage Against the Machine.\u00a0 But they’re tailing off… while “Bad Romance” just keeps on selling.\u00a0 In fact, this is its tenth week on the chart, six of them spent in the top five.\u00a0 In many ways, it’s a more representative number one single than either of the last two.\u00a0 As it happens, Lady Gaga also had the first number one of 2009 (“Just Dance<\/a>“), and the biggest selling single of 2009 (“Poker Face<\/a>“), so it seems appropriate that she gets to kick off 2010 as well.<\/p>\n

Joe McElderry is still at number 2, largely on the strength of physical sales.\u00a0 On the download chart, he’s at a rather less impressive number 7.\u00a0 This ought to be cause for slight concern, because chances are he won’t be able to rely on physical sales so much with his future releases.\u00a0 Frankly, there aren’t many places to buy CD singles any more, so unless you’ve got an oddity like a charity single or an X Factor<\/em> coronation – something that might get stocked in supermarkets and the like – you’re largely dependent on downloads.<\/p>\n

As for Rage Against the Machine, they swandive from last week’s number 2 to this week’s number 40 – which makes me wonder whether their sales last week weren’t because people discovered the song and bought it on its merits, but because a ton of people downloaded it on Sunday 19 December, unaware that the chart week had already closed at midnight.<\/p>\n

The only proper new entry on this week’s chart, and thus the first\u00a0new entry of 2010,\u00a0is “Take That” by Wiley and Chew Fu.\u00a0\u00a0Wiley is an veteran of the genre that ended up being called grime, despite his best efforts to persuade people to call it “Eskibeat.”<\/a>\u00a0 Chew Fu is an American remixer, getting his first hit in his own right.\u00a0 Not exactly a radio-friendly number (and they seem to have done an even less accessible edit for the video), it lands at number 22.\u00a0 I like it.\u00a0 It’s silly.<\/p>\n

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That may be the only new entry, but thanks to the Christmas singles dropping out, and tons of “review of the year” programming on radio and television, the lower end of the chart sees a veritable slew of re-entries for records that were big hits\u00a0a few months back\u00a0(plus a couple which were still hanging around just outside the chart).\u00a0 I’m not linking to videos for all of these, but making a probably-brief return this week are…<\/p>\n

    \n
  • “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon<\/strong> at 30, a number 1 from 2008 which has now spent 67 weeks in the top 75.<\/li>\n
  • “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga<\/strong> at 32, the biggest selling single of last year.<\/li>\n
  • “Sexy Bitch” by David Guetta & Akon <\/strong>at 33, another former number 1.<\/li>\n
  • “Beat Again” by JLS <\/strong>at 34, a number 1 from July.<\/li>\n
  • “I Need You” by N-Dubz <\/strong>at 36, which peaked at number 5 in November and was hovering just outside the chart already.<\/li>\n
  • “I Can Transform Ya” by Chris Brown <\/strong>at 37.\u00a0 This peaked at 26 in November, looked to be well on its way out of the top 75, and is possibly the oddest re-entry.<\/li>\n
  • “Break Your Heart” by Taio Cruz<\/strong> at 38, a number 1 hit from September.<\/li>\n
  • And the apparently perennial\u00a0“Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol<\/strong> at 39, re-entering from nowhere after being announced as the most played record in Britain\u00a0of the last decade (quite an achievement considering it wasn’t even released until 2006 – though it’s worth pointing out that these figures come from the PPL, and so they include music being played in shops and so forth).\u00a0 This gives it a staggering total of 95 weeks in the singles chart, though it’s still some way off the record of 122 set by “My Way.”<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    With the race for Christmas Number 1 over, and the country still on holiday, the week between Christmas and New Year is traditionally a dead one, so far as the charts are concerned.\u00a0 It’s not so much that you can’t buy records – the vast majority of singles are now sold as downloads, so it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}