Pitchfork: Indie Labels to Inflate UK Charts

The British music charts are notorious for their odd rules, chief among them the quirk that has long led to bands releasing two CD singles for the same song with slightly different B-sides; combined with a certain amount of fickleness from the record-buying public, they add an additional element of volatility to what is, when you get right down to it, basically a bunch of corporate executives playing dice in an alley, except that when someone goes on a winning streak, all of us have to put up with Starsailor for another month.

As of April 17, however, the official UK singles chart will combine physical media and purchased downloads into the same listing, which complicates things further, for the simple reason that the Internet is insane. There's no law against one bored websurfer submitting 10,000 electronic votes to nominate Devendra Banhart as USA Today's "Best Theme Restaurant or Chain" (at least, uh, we hope there isn't), but with actual money at stake, some folks have fears about the process.

At least two small labels that fear meddling by the majors are debating a plan to scam the new singles chart in its very first week in order to prove that it can be done, according to Guy Holmes, an indie labelowner whose first success was selling a million copies of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy". "They believe it's the only way they can teach the chart people that the security of the chart is no longer there," he said in an interview with the BBC. "We're being told it's secure, but the fact of the matter is that would mean Apple or any other download company would be supplying the credit card details of every single one of their customers to the Official Chart Company...I find that quite hard to swallow. What's going to stop some major record label that's invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in a new artist spending a couple of thousand on iTunes?"

The idea, however, is not new, and history might give Holmes' unnamed friends pause: In 1997, a TV journalist teamed up with producer Mike Stock to make a single that was supposed to feature in an expose about shady industry practices, including rigging the charts. The single, however, only sold 800 copies and the associated TV show turned out to have fudged the facts behind several of its own accusations.