Psonar Blog

The concept of the top 40 singles chart is, essentially, a system of monitoring musical fads. Whatever track a few thousand people buy during the space of seven days is lauded as the country’s favourite without taking into account the fact that most discerning music lovers – such as the gang here at Psonar – would rather use their iPod to butter their morning toast than buy a Basshunter track.

Indeed, thanks to the charts, Robson & Jerome became, technically, the most popular ‘musicians’ of the 1990s and the same institution (more recently) gave us donk and reggaeton. Both sound like a brand of washing powder and have roughly the same musical aspirations as a box of Daz.

So what would a real chart consist of? Music that people currently have stored on their MP3 players, iTunes, hard drive and phones, maybe? This, you could reasonably argue, is the music that people actually listen to: it’s the soundtrack to your bus, tube or train journey to work, the songs you have on at the gym or whilst waiting for a friend (or a plane) and the music that accompanies you everyday regardless of what’s number one in the singles chart. Yes, we hear you cry, that’s exactly the sort of chart we want!

Well, now that users have started to store their tracks using Psonar, we can reveal the ten most popular tracks as found on any music playing or storage device that’s been connected to the SongShifter app in the past few weeks:

1 ) Oasis – Wonderwall
2 ) Massive Attack – Teardrop
3 ) The Chemical Brothers – Hey Boy, Hey Girl
4 ) Nirvana – Come As You Are
5 ) Daft Punk – Aerodynamic
6 ) Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
7 ) Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven
8 ) Coldplay – The Scientist
9 ) Red Hot Chili Peppers – By the Way
10 ) Massive Attack – Angel

As we get more users uploading more tracks, expect the list to become more eclectic but it’s interesting to see that Nirvana, some years after their demise, are the most popular band on Psonar at the moment. Massive Attack and the Chemical Brothers also feature heavily, as part of a general trend towards music from the 1990s, with a wide variety of other artists scattered in-between and the recently-imploded Oasis taking the number one spot.

An interesting sub-plot to this chart is provided by a man called Trent Reznor. For those not familiar with his band, Nine Inch Nails, it’s worth knowing that he really doesn’t like people trying to rip him off. So when he found out that a few record stores were removing the bonus CD on his 1992 album ‘Broken’ and selling it separately, he re-released the album on one CD and hid the bonus songs in track 98 and 99. Tracks 7 – 97 each contained three seconds of precisely nothing and were all called, handily, ‘Silence’.

So when we had a look at the raw data for the chart, ‘Silence’ by Nine Inch Nails did rather well – it only took a handful of people to own the album (and thus almost a hundred versions of ‘Silence’) for the track to start creeping up the chart through the sheer number of uploads per person and making us think, for a while, that it was some sort of masterpiece known to everyone else but us.

Thanks for the silence, Trent.