Credit: Bee Dogs & Bee Girls will be ok

With the change in chart rules – a cynic might say a desperate bid to try to retain a scrap of relevancy –  any track downloaded from an official vendor now counts towards the charts, regardless of whether it has a physical copy to buy or not. Allegedly this has re-democratised the charts to some extent. Music has been taken out of the hands of those Evil Record Exec-types, at least to some extent. OK Go might take over the world. And Kajagoogoo could rocket up the charts as people purchase “Too Shy” en masse. Hell, just because everything’s chart-eligible now, doesn’t mean the public have suddenly developed taste. There are reports of sales of Jackson 5 going up following a task on Celebrity Big Brother. Maybe the charts really are going to become a mirror to what’s genuinely popular about popular culture again.

Koopa have just hit the Top 40 despite having no record deal and or physical copy of their single “Blag, Steal & Borrow” out in the shops. It charted higher than new releases from much-feted new(ish) boy Jamie T, Britpop survivor Jarvis Cocker, and a collaboration between Akon and Snoop Dogg. However, the people handling their hype-machine are Quite Great PR, the people responsible for Sandy Thom’s faux web-sensation malarky last year – so maybe this is just an unsigned band manipulating the new rules to their advantage, focussing their fanbase into buying singles in what is traditionally a slow period of the year for record sales. Couple that with the fact that Martin Cooper, late father of 2 of the band, invested a sweet £20K into the single, and the band already have had two advantages over the more typical unsigned peers.

But with bands like Enter Shikari rejecting label culture entirely, and proof that the top 40 is attainable without label involvement, it could truly be the harbinger of chart change. Or it could be that the cost of CD singles has plummeted over the last couple of years. Just Jack’s “Starz In Their Eyes” hit number 4 and was going for 99p – half the cost of a single a few years ago, and low enough to tempt a casual record shopper. If its just 20p more than it is on iTunes…