The UK Singles Chart is compiled by the Official Charts Company (OCC) on behalf of the British record industry. In the 2000s the chart week ran from Sunday to Saturday, and the top 40 singles were revealed each Sunday on BBC Radio 1. At the start of the decade, before the advent of legal music downloads, it was based entirely on sales of physical singles from retail outlets, but in 2005 permanent downloads began to be included in the chart compilation.[1][2]
During the 2000s, 275 singles reached the No. 1 position on the chart, the most of any decade so far. Over this period, Westlife were the most successful group and music act at reaching the top spot, with 11 No. 1 singles. Rihanna and Jay-Z's song "Umbrella" spent 10 weeks at No. 1 in 2007, the longest spell at the top of the charts since Wet Wet Wet's 1994 hit "Love Is All Around", which topped the charts for 15 weeks. The Internet allowed music to be heard by vast numbers of people on social networking sites such as YouTube and Myspace; it also increased piracy. This and the introduction of the UK Singles Downloads Chart in 2004[3] led to a decrease in record sales and a reduction in the number of copies sold of a No. 1 record on the singles chart.[4]Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" became the first song to reach the top of the charts based on downloads alone in 2006, remaining at No. 1 for nine consecutive weeks.[5]
Physical single sales had been falling for more than a decade but digital single sales finally turned the trend around in 2008 with combined physical and digital single sales growing 33% over the previous year.[6]Lily Allen made herself known on the Internet through her Myspace page, and following this exposure, her debut single "Smile" peaked at No. 1. Three years later, her single "The Fear" topped the chart for four consecutive weeks, being the longest running No. 1 single of 2009.
In 2000, 42 songs (not including Westlife's "I Have a Dream" / "Seasons in the Sun" which first reached number one at the end of 1999) hit the top spot, a UK charts record for most number ones in a calendar year. The year 2000 also holds the record for most consecutive weeks with a new number one, with a different single hitting the number-one spot every week from 24 June to 16 September.[8]
The following artists achieved four or more number-one hits during the 2000s. A number of artists had number-one singles on their own as well as part of a collaboration. Madonna, Timbaland and Justin Timberlake's song "4 Minutes", for example, is counted for all three artists because they were credited on the cover, while "Where Is the Love?" does not count for Timberlake as he did not receive artist credit on that track in order to avoid overexposure.
In April 1973, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) began classifying singles and albums by the number of units shipped. The highest threshold is "Platinum" which, since 1989, is awarded to singles with over 600,000 units.[22][23][nb 4]
In July 2013, the BPI started a process of automatic certification regardless of original release dates,[25] and since July 2014 audio streaming is included in the calculation of units at 100 streams equivalent to 1 sale or shipment.[26] Hence, many of the singles released in the 2000s have been awarded certification in the 2010s.
^The number of sales required to qualify for Platinum, Gold and Silver discs was dropped in 1989 from the former thresholds of Silver (250,000 units), Gold (500,000 units), and Platinum (1,000,000 units) to the current thresholds of Silver (200,000 units), Gold (400,000 units), and Platinum (600,000 units)[22][24]