The Ultimate Averaged Chart - The BBC Chart Re-Imagined

[MrTibbs]

I also asked Dave Taylor about the subject of record stores supplying sales data to more than than one music paper and he too said they did not. He never explained how he knew this though. But somehow both he and Alan had lots of inside information on subjects like this.
I don't really think it matters though, if the same info was given to more than one paper the info still remains the same irregardless and wouldn't change the outcome.

[MrTibbs]

Have corrected that misprint Woz. Thanks.

[Woz1234]

Greetings Pop Pickers ! Here is the next Ultimate Averaged Chart Top 30 for Week Ending 19th December 1964.

Black Girl - Herman's Hermits

Should've that been by The Four Pennies

[Graham76man]

Also, I specifically asked Alan a good while back did a record shop report to multiple music paper charts, and he said NO they did not...

For Alan to know that he would have to had a complete list of all the Record Shops that supplied information to all the chart compilers. I think that very unlikely. If he had that he would have known things like area coverage and a reasonably accurate list of the coverage of the papers. From what I have seen he's very sketchy on the amount of shops taking part in the NME one.
It's likely that BMRB might have agreements in place for retailers not to supply information to other chart compilers because of payment reasons. Indeed if any chart compiler did pay the shops to supply any lists then you could well expect an agreement to be specified of not doing the same.
But personally, unless someone can say that the shops were being paid to supply information to each chart compiler. With no fee, if I was a record shop owner back then I would have sent the information to whoever wanted it. Or I would not have sent it all.
Unless you got paid to supply the information, or got a discount in the paper for adds. What would be the motivation for the shops to take part?
Later on the record companies found out who was taking part and made certain that the shops got paid for sending in lists of their records. Even then lots of London stores were the ones taking part.

[RokinRobinOfLocksley]

In Alan Smith's threads here, he specifically says record dealers reporting to RR supplied them with a Top 50 list every week. He also at times mentions how long a list the other dealers were supplying to the other charts, though that info is not consistently given, even when the charts expanded their number of positions. I emailed Alan about this recently, he hasn't yet replied. It would be good to find this out, as you would indeed get different results in averaging out Top 50 lists vs. Top 20 lists.

Also, I specifically asked Alan a good while back did a record shop report to multiple music paper charts, and he said NO they did not...

[MrTibbs]

Greetings Pop Pickers ! Here is the next Ultimate Averaged Chart Top 30 for Week Ending 19th December 1964.

The Ultimate Averaged Chart - Week Ending December 19th 1964							BBC	NME	MM	Disc	RR	Total
Last	This						Chart	Chart	Chart	Chart	Chart	Points
Week	Week	Title and Artist					Number Of Chart Positions				30	Scored
1	1	I Feel Fine - The Beatles					1	1	1	1	1	19050
2	2	I'm Gonna Be Strong - Gene Pitney					2	2	2	2	4	18245
4	3	Downtown - Petula Clark					3	3	3	3	2	17865
5	4	Walk Tall - Val Doonican					4	5	4	4	3	17030
3	5	Little Red Rooster - The Rolling Stones					5	4	5	5	5	16710
9	6	I Understand - Freddie and The Dreamers					6	6	7	6	7	15540
15	7	No Arms Can Ever Hold You - The Bachelors					7	8	6	7	8	15205
6	8	Pretty Paper - Roy Orbison					8	9	8	8	6	14575
16	9	I Could Easily Fall - Cliff Richard					9	10	9	12	9	13470
12	10	A Message To Martha - Adam Faith					10	12	10	9	12	12865
24	11	Somewhere - P J Proby					11	7	13	10	14	12845
7	12	Baby Love - The Supremes					12	13	11	11	10	12385
22	13	Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley					13	11	14	13	13	11580
10	14	There's A Heartache Following Me - Jim Reeves					14	16	12	14	11	11150
19	15	Terry - Twinkle					15	15	15	17	15	9960
8	16	All Day And All Of The Night - The Kinks					16	18	16	15	16	9225
29	17	Girl Don't Come - Sandie Shaw					17	17	17	16	18	8905
21	18	Genie With The Light Brown Lamp - The Shadows					18	19	21	18	21	7050
13	19	Losing You - Dusty Springfield					19	22	20	21	17	6740
27	20	What Have They Done To The Rain - The Searchers					20	19	23	20	19	6520
11	21	Um Um Um Um Um Um - Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders					22	21	19	23	24	6395
NEW	22	Yeh Yeh - Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames					21	14	27	19	26	6025
14	23	He's In Town - The Rockin' Berries					23	25	18	24	23	5830
18	24	Walk Away - Matt Monro					25	26	22	25	22	4615
23	25	Show Me Girl - Herman's Hermits					26		26	26	20	2685
20	26	Tokyo Melody - Helmut Zacharias					27		24		25	2260
17	27	Don't Bring Me Down - The Pretty Things					28		25	29	28	1955
NEW	28	Go Now - The Moody Blues					29	23		30		1700
NEW	29	Like A Child - Julie Rogers					30	27		27		1200
NEW	30	Cast Your Fate To The Wind - Sounds Orchestral						28		28		900
		Beatles For Sale (LP) - The Beatles					24	24		22		2300
		Black Girl - The Four Pennies							28			750
		Oh Pretty Woman - Roy Orbison							29		30	585
		The Wedding - Julie Rogers							30		29	420
		Christmas Will Be Just Another Lonely Day - Brenda Lee						29				400
		Sha La La - Manfred Mann									27	340
		Ferry Cross The Mersey - Gerry and The Pacemakers						30				200

[MrTibbs]

I can tell you now Graham having compiled all the December charts that it doesn't appear in any chart. What we don't know is whether stores supplied a list of 10, 20, 30, or whatever of their best selling records to the music papers who of course just allocated points to them.

[Graham76man]

Unlike now Brain I don't think the record companies back then co-ordinated releases to prevent a clash with other major artists. It doesn't happen again between them after 1964.

Record Companies were dived between labels and sub labels. The EMI group being the best known included Parlophone, Columbia, MGM, Motown and others. Then there was Decca and Philips, with their subsidiaries.
The A&R people of each label would listen to the latests songs that came out of the song publishers. The would assign songs to the acts under their label. Since the A&R men were in direct competition with each other even under the same parent company they would release records all at the same time. Up to around 1963 the old system of records released at the start of each month, possibly a week later, was still in place. By 1964 records should have been coming out on a Friday each week. So it was possible to stagger the release of records, thus preventing clashes. Of course before that if you released a record of a top song a month late, then the other labels or your company could have got a bigger seller with the thing you had just released.
The Beatles were of course doing their own songs and this would lead to artists writing and singing their own songs. Rather than ones coming out of Tin Pan Alley.
Since the Rolling Stones man Andrew Loog Oldham was connected with the Beatles manager, they had an agreement not to set the same release date for the two acts records. So there was no clashes after 1964 with the two acts.
What the Beatles didn't release was of course food for the acts that didn't do their own songs. And many Beatles songs made it big on the back of the old system that they were changing forever.

Now on how accurate the 60's charts were. At the end of the day they were all samples. Often sampling the same shops. As we saw with the Sun asking 250 shops, but getting 71 back. Not all shops would take part. Some of the biggest retailers would not give out sales information as it was like telling the competition your business.
I suspect that they may have been getting paid to supply the information. They were when BMRB took over. So if you look at the charts they are nearly all pretty close to each other, even the ones with bigger samples. Even RR is often a few ahead or a few behind MM on lots of records.
Where it all goes wrong is of course on the records that don't fit the sample. Often quite well known, even these days, records that would have sold but not enough in the samples. Put all 8,000 shops in the mix and although all the records appear in the top 30 of these chart sample all of a sudden a record well appear that's not in any or maybe on Record Retailers breakers list.
For example in the last Real Chart for December 1964, at number 3 is Ruby & The Romantics - When you're young and in love. And I wait in an anticipation to see if will appear in this list.

[MrTibbs]

Unlike now Brain I don't think the record companies back then co-ordinated releases to prevent a clash with other major artists. It doesn't happen again between them after 1964.

[MrTibbs]

Melody Maker from July 1960 and throughout the sixties were without doubt using the biggest sample of all the papers though Splodg. I researched this before starting this project. From July 60 MM were determined to have the best chart based on the biggest sample which was also the only one to include Northern Ireland. Plus Alan Smith is an acknowledged authority due to his extensive knowledge and contacts in the business .
This was also borne out in earlier in communications I still have from Dave Taylor who himself had contacts including Derek Chinnery who compiled , in a fashion, the BBC chart.
So I believe , at this time period of compilation that 250 for MM, 200 for NME, 100 for Disc, and 85 for RR is not that far out.

[Splodj]

I seem to recall that the charts in the Tuesday editions of the Daily Mirror (MM) and Daily Sketch (NME) had the same positions as those that appeared in the MM's and NME's own publications. If so, there was a hard deadline of Monday evening by which those two charts (or at least the Top 20 carried in the newspapers) needed to be compiled.

I see no reason to disbelieve The Sun's account of what the compilers told them was their sample. NME's "up to 300" seems deliberately vague. Do they mean they have a pool of 300 like MM and phone around as many as they can? The tied positions and enormous amount of work involved in phoning before they can do the tabulation (compared with MM opening envelopes) suggests to me that they sampled a lot less.

[braindeadpj]

It's interesting that on the average chart, twice a new entry from The Beatles has prevented The Rolling Stones from reaching No.1 so far. I wonder how many times this kind of thing will happen on the average chart (or did happen on the other charts for that matter) i.e. where the same artist prevents the same different artist from reaching No.1.

[MrTibbs]

I think all of us who were a 'child of the sixties' are engrossed in the mystery of the charts back then. As a ten year old in 1964 I took the BBC charts as gospel because I saw them on TOTP, yet I bought the NME and just accepted they had their own chart too as with MM whose chart I saw in the daily newspapers.
It was only as I got older I began to question why they all differed slightly and this puzzled me.

We will never know the true weekly sales figures from that era, they are gone forever, the best we have now is believing in each chart as being representative of the time in its own way and by further combining them into one average chart brings them all together under one umbrella yet still acknowledges each as an individual participant.

That is what I'm striving to achieve here, compiling that average chart and finding the centre ground yet also displaying each papers proud place in its formulation. The 'chart of charts' .

[RokinRobinOfLocksley]

Ha, we've had this conversation before, Robbie. Someone else had logged into Dave's account at either Popscene or Buzzjack, and was making edits to Dave's earlier posts. Maybe 2 years ago?

[Robbie]

I asked Alan Smith about the different chart sampling periods, and Alan was Adam Adamant in firmly stating that all charts used a Monday thru Saturday period. They compiled their average chart results on different days though, thus the main reason why various charts couldn't get their data into the BBC on time, and if they were late they weren't included in the average. Alan of course talked to all the chart compilers and got this info right from the horses' mouths.

On the other hand, I seem to recall Dave Taylor saying the sampling periods may have been different. Another chap Brian Hankin posted on the Haven forum in 2011 that MM, Disc, and (RR after July 1967) all used Monday thru Saturday, but NME, RM, and early RR were all different from that, and different from each other, and that there were thus 4 different sampling periods used among the 5 charts !!

When I asked Alan (a year ago) about what Brian had posted, Alan said "it's all codswallop. All chart compilers used Monday to Saturday sales period in that order!"

There was some belief among a handful of posters at Haven that Brian Hankin may have been Dave Taylor*. At the very least the two knew each other and Brian once posted information provided by Dave because Dave (for some reason) didn't want to sign up for Haven.

*Brian Hankin was last seen at Haven on 14 January 2020 (while logged in) though his last post was on 20 May 2013. As Dave died in 2014 it would suggest they were different posters but that Brian was simply posting on Dave's behalf at Haven.

[kingofskiffle]

Monday to Saturday makes sense from a compilation of chart perspective. You print on, day, Thursday for delivery to shops on Friday so your issue is ready Wednesday. That means you need the chart Wednesday. Assume a day to compile so that means you need the data on Monday. No Sunday shops at that point so the last sale would be Saturday.

[RokinRobinOfLocksley]

I asked Alan Smith about the different chart sampling periods, and Alan was Adam Adamant in firmly stating that all charts used a Monday thru Saturday period. They compiled their average chart results on different days though, thus the main reason why various charts couldn't get their data into the BBC on time, and if they were late they weren't included in the average. Alan of course talked to all the chart compilers and got this info right from the horses' mouths.

On the other hand, I seem to recall Dave Taylor saying the sampling periods may have been different. Another chap Brian Hankin posted on the Haven forum in 2011 that MM, Disc, and (RR after July 1967) all used Monday thru Saturday, but NME, RM, and early RR were all different from that, and different from each other, and that there were thus 4 different sampling periods used among the 5 charts !!

When I asked Alan (a year ago) about what Brian had posted, Alan said "it's all codswallop. All chart compilers used Monday to Saturday sales period in that order!"

[MrTibbs]

I'm really pleased you and so many others guys enjoy it Robbie. I'm defo enjoying compiling it. Aside from compiling what I believe to be the most accurate chart reflecting the time I'm also enjoying for the first time anywhere, I think, seeing all the charts lined up side by side giving a complete historical picture.
Thanks too MyFriendJack, yeah the RR lost out on 2 counts, yes their compilation day differed from the others and it also had the smallest sample of shop returns to work with. But by averaging out we definitely get a more smoothed out chart which removes individual inconsistencies.

The article in The Sun from 1964 is really interesting but I do believe it to be erroneous in specifying the number of chart returns used by MM and NME. Alan Smith's exhaustive research over a number of years I think gives the most accurate outcome regarding stores sampled at this time, putting MM on around 250 and NME on around 200. That's what I am using for calculation with Disc on 100 and RR on 85.

[MyFriendJack]

Just been reading through this fascinating thread, really good stuff. Just one thought on the fact that the RR charts always seemed out of step with the others. I seem to recall reading (many years ago) that this was partly a result of RR using a slightly different seven day window. If RR asked dealers to submit their returns based on sales over Saturday to Friday, that would inevitably lead to a different result than would arise from using Monday to Saturday. Unfortunately I can't elsewhere I read this, but I am hoping that by posting this, I might trigger someone else's memory.

[Robbie]

The NME had a joint number 2 for Gene Pitney and The Rolling Stones on 12 December 1964? Other than the joint number 2 on the NME chart, all the papers were in agreement with the entire top 5.

Thanks for continuing to compile the Ultimate Averaged Chart MrTibbs!

[MrTibbs]

Greetings Pop Pickers ! Here is the next Ultimate Averaged Chart Top 30 for Week Ending 12th December 1964.

The Ultimate Averaged Chart - Week Ending December 12th 1964							BBC	NME	MM	Disc	RR	Total
Last	This						Chart	Chart	Chart	Chart	Chart	Points
Week	Week	Title and Artist					Number Of Chart Positions				30	Scored
1	1	I Feel Fine - The Beatles					1	1	1	1	1	19050
3	2	I'm Gonna Be Strong - Gene Pitney					2	2	2	2	2	18415
2	3	Little Red Rooster - The Rolling Stones					3	2	3	3	3	17980
4	4	Downtown - Petula Clark					4	4	4	4	4	17145
9	5	Walk Tall - Val Doonican					5	5	5	5	5	16510
11	6	Pretty Paper - Roy Orbison					6	6	6	8	9	15420
5	7	Baby Love - The Supremes					8	8	7	6	8	15055
6	8	All Day And All Of The Night - The Kinks					7	7	8	7	7	14990
16	9	I Understand - Freddie and The Dreamers					9	9	9	9	12	13715
10	10	There's A Heartache Following Me - Jim Reeves					10	14	11	10	6	12625
8	11	Um Um Um Um Um Um - Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders					11	12	13	12	10	11985
18	12	A Message To Martha - Adam Faith					12	11	12	14	14	11895
12	13	Losing You - Dusty Springfield					13	17	14	11	11	10750
7	14	He's In Town - The Rockin' Berries					14	22	10	13	13	10380
27	15	No Arms Can Ever Hold You - The Bachelors					15	14	15	15	16	10275
28	16	I Could Easily Fall - Cliff Richard					16	10	18	17	20	9785
13	17	Don't Bring Me Down - The Pretty Things					17	18	16	16	17	9040
20	18	Walk Away - Matt Monro					19	24	17	21	18	7005
24	19	Terry - Twinkle					20	20	21	18	24	6595
15	20	Tokyo Melody - Helmut Zacharias					18	27	19	19	15	6360
30	21	Genie With The Light Brown Lamp - The Shadows					21=	19	24	24	22	5615
NEW	22	Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley					23	16	26	22	26	5575
22	23	Show Me Girl - Herman's Hermits					21=	23	22	25	19	5470
NEW	24	Somewhere - P J Proby					24	13	28	23	30	5235
21	25	Black Girl - The Four Pennies					25	26	20	29	21	4800
14	26	Sha La La - Manfred Mann					26		23	20	23	3780
NEW	27	What Have They Done To The Rain - The Searchers					29	21			27	2340
17	28	Oh Pretty Woman - Roy Orbison					30		25	27	28	2155
NEW	29	Girl Don't Come - Sandie Shaw						24	30	30		1750
23	30	The Wedding - Julie Rogers					27		27		25	1510
		Beatles For Sale (LP) - The Beatles					28	28		26		1100
		Remember (Walking In The Sand) - The Shangri-Las							29		29	670
		Yeh Yeh - Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames						29				400
		Ringo - Lorne Green								28		300
		Baby I Need Your Loving - The Fourmost						30				200
		Cast Your Fate To The Wind - Sounds Orchestral						30				200

[MrTibbs]

The one for 28th November Graham

[MrTibbs]

Nope, thus far Robin just used once in 1964 for Can't Buy Me Love, and boy it was so worth it for that single lol

[Graham76man]

Which of Brian's charts represents the same week as the Sun paper's chart?

[RokinRobinOfLocksley]

Another case where the BBC invoked their #1 rule, but Brian didn't have to...