About germanchartblog

I love pop music. And I do love statistics. Both together one could find within the weekly charts. Some people say the official sales charts are not relevant anymore. They are manipulated by big players of the music and television industry. Well – this might by true. But I think the charts can tell you something about our culture and our society. One man is really attesting this with looking into the British charts weekly. His name is James Masterton and I really thank him for giving me the pleasure every single week reading his stories and analyses.

There was a similar chart watch for the german charts as well made by Jochen Tierbach. Around 2007 /08 he stopped writing about statistics for the German charts and now only makes the newsletter for Swiss site hitparade.ch. Also the chartbreaker blog by Oz & Fee stopped commenting new entries in 2008. So I felt an empty space left which no one really filled with content. The chart compiling company media control only publishes short press texts which miss a lot of background information. You can read in every single week about the "big successes" of the music industry – no analysis and almost no comparison to the past.
That is of course not the major problem – media control as promoting company for the music industry might not talk about fails and errors of its contracting body. But media control also acts as a very strict watchdog which information about chart positions are spread around. The effect one could find is: there are several sites which are offering the whole chart history for every single country in this world - but not for Germany. On the other hand information services had been launched which are very arguable working with doubtful datas from only download sites or whatever. Just have look at oljo.de to get what I am talking about.

My attempt here is to give you some information what's going on in the German mainstream without breach the copyright of media control. That's why this blog is looking at the charts and tries to analyze tracks or significant moves in a broader way. I try to ask: what does it mean if the majority of people buy this or that track?

Well – I would write much more texts even about smaller hits and releases. To me the lower end of the charts are much more intersting telling a lot about new tendencies in music businness. Doing all this here for free sets the limit of time spent in blogging.

I hope you enjoy my very subjective take on music here. And I am always grateful for comments, added details and suggestions.


contact: georg pop via u2il05 (at) yahoo (.) de