Well, back to business as usual – ish.  This is genuinely the end of an era – the very last chart to be based purely on sales, after 62 years.  The impact of streaming data is likely to be fairly limited in the short term given the weighting (as to which, see last week’s post), and the midweeks tend to confirm that.  But the symbolism is important.

34.  Austin Mahone featuring Pitbull – “Mmm Yeah”

Austin Mahone is basically the American equivalent of Elyar Fox – a teenager who was found on YouTube and is now being pushed as a teen idol.  The video is evidently working on the assumption that the target audience is way too young to have seen the gimmick in Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” video (which did it better).  Pitbull is there to collect his pay cheque and give it some name value.

It was at 25 in the midweeks, so it’s pretty clearly a case front loaded sales that flared out quickly.

30.  Dimitri Vegas, Martin Garrix & Like Mike – “Tremor”

Another of the Benelux rave collaborations that make the charts periodically.  The familiar name here is Martin Garrix, who had a number 1 last year with “Animals”, and followed that up with the rather similar top ten hit “Wizard”.  Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike are brothers from Belgium; they’ve had a fair amount of success at home, including an improbable collaboration with Katy B.  (Weirdly, Wikipedia suggests Belgium is the only other country where Katy B has hits.  Why Belgium?  Why does her appeal stop at the Dutch border…?)

26.  Ed Sheeran – “Thinking Out Loud”
19.  Ed Sheeran – “Don’t”

With the release of his album, Ed Sheeran’s “Sing” and “One” are joined by two more tracks being cherry picked.  There was a third in the midweeks.  This isn’t all that common; normally, if you’re enough of a fan to be interested in the album tracks, you’re enough of a fan to just buy the whole album.  We see it occasionally with the likes of One Direction, or with album tracks featuring high profile guest stars who have their own fan base.  “Don’t” has some justification for being selected, since it’s being used in a Beats By Dre commercial (plus it’s the vaguely gossipy one supposedly about his break-up with a Famous Person).  And “Thinking Out Loud” was performed on the BBC.

10.  Usher – “Good Kisser”

Usher is one of those guys I complete forget exists between releases.  He generally leaves me cold, but the minimalism of this one appeals to me.  This came out in the rest of the world a month ago, but the UK labels still have a fetish for promoting everything for weeks before releasing it.  Thus far, to be fair, the evidence does not suggest that this is causing them to lose all that many sales to piracy.

Usher is now in the 18th year of his chart career, and if we disregard a guest appearance on a flop Ludacris single, it’s his fourth straight top ten hit.  Number 5 in the midweeks, though, so again it must have tailed off as the week went on.

4.  Example – “One More Day (Stay With Me)”

Oh, and here’s another easily forgettable artist.  My problem with Example, I think, is that he obviously aspires to do something more than production line pop, but he’s not ending up with anything that’s actually much of an improvement.  Still, if it is indeed number 4 on Sunday, it’ll be his biggest hit since “Say Nothing”, which got to number 2 in 2012; the stumble that followed his change of record labels may finally have been overcome.

1.  Oliver Heldens & Becky Hill – “Gecko (Overdrive)”

A random word with a completely unrelated random word in brackets?  A European-sounding bloke and a British-sounding woman?  Why, would this be a licensed European dance record with a vocal track added, by any chance?

Indeed it is!  Heldens is a teenage producer from Rotterdam, and in addition to “Gecko”, his other singles include “Stinger”, “Juggernaut”, “Striker”, “Triumph”, “Buzzer”, “Javelin” and “Panther” – all of which sounds like an Avengers line-up waiting to happen.  The instrumental original was a (minor) hit in Holland.  To be fair, this is a case where the vocal line is probably an improvement; it’s turned a fairly one-dimensional dance track into some kind of song.  The video… well, the video is just plain odd.

Becky Hill was a semifinalist on The Voice UK, and if it didn’t make her any sort of star, it does seem to have done something for her career.  She’s Rudimental’s favoured live singer for the festival circuit, standing in for the assorted female guest stars who appear on their records, and she was also the uncredited singer on Wilkinson’s “Afterglow”.

On the album chart, pretty much nobody is willing to take on Ed Sheeran…

• “X” by Ed Sheeran at number 1.  Obviously.
• “Once More Round the Sun” by Mastodon at 10.  Old-school heavy rock, not in obvious competition with Ed Sheeran.  Their highest chart place to date.  Single: “High Road”.
• A re-entry for “Songs in the Key of Life” by Stevie Wonder at 14, originally a number 2 in 1977.  A case of heavy discounting somewhere?