The Hot List: The Rise and Fall of the Singles Chart

How a simple list defined popular music, from Vera Lynn to Ed Sheeran

The actions that define culture are rarely deliberate. Culture is, in many ways, an accumulation of accidents, small gestures and stumbles that somehow end up sticking together like a giant snowball rolling down a hill. Every successful band has the moment when they almost gave up just before their breakthrough; every artistic movement has its rejections, arguments, and fistfights; every book has a graveyard of characters and scenes that were killed to make way for the story. The end result may look neat — libraries of books ordered alphabetically, artworks organized into linear chronologies — but the process of making culture is anything but.

The same is true for how we measure the attention we give to culture. As we’ve seen in earlier episodes of this series on the history of attention, the concepts we use to frame and organize attention are palimpsests, built through the same competitions, frustrations, and dead ends as culture itself. They are invented to solve an immediate problem but grow in value and importance until they end up an inextricable part of the culture they seek to measure.

This is how the singles chart started — not as an attempt to create the most influential concept in…