The UK singles chart can be traced back to November 1952, when newspaper New Musical Express (NME) began collecting sales data from no more than a few dozen record stores which were initially aggregated into a list of the top 12 best-selling songs. This was expanded into a top 20 list in October 1954. Rival publication Record Mirror
were quick to follow, compiling their own chart from January 1955. This was initially a top 10 and then a top 20 from October 1956, giving parity with NME. Both would later expand with Record Mirror becoming a top 20 in October 1955 and NME a top 30 in April 1956.
More rivals would soon arrive on the scene. Melody Maker started compiling its own top 20 from April 1956 and was soon joined by Disc in February 1958 and Record Retailer in March 1960. The proliferation of competing charts created an often confusing landscape for music fans, as different publications occasionally produced conflicting results depending on which record shops they surveyed and how they weighted their data. A song could sit at number one in one publication while languishing outside the top five in another. It's Record Retailer that is used as the source for all chart data between 1960 and early 1969, as its methodology — surveying record retailers directly — was considered the most commercially representative. Data from NME is used for the 1950s.
Until 1969, there was no unified single chart. It was, as indicated, a fragmented situation with multiple newspapers and magazines publishing their own chart from different sources. That all changed in February of that year when the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) was tasked by the BBC to compile the first official chart listing, culled from a sampling of 250 record shops, chosen at random from approximately 6,000. The BMRB then sent the
information over to the BBC every Tuesday.
This arrangement continued until 1983 when Gallup took over, and it was at this time the chart was expanded into a top 100. In 1990, the Chart Information Network was formed, a joint venture comprised of the BBC, Spotlight Publications (who published Music Week), the British Association of Record Dealers (BARD), and shortly thereafter the BPI. It was BARD - courtesy of member retailers including HMV, Virgin, WH Smith and Woolworths - who provided sales data to the Chart Information Network. In February 1994, Millward Brown started compiling the chart and has continued ever since.
The Chart Information Network changed its name to The Official UK Charts Company in November 2001, a name that remains to this day.