I disagree that the kids are not interested in the charts any more, radio 1 gets a few million listening each week and on the messageboards I visit people are very interested to know what is #1, top 10, top 40, top 75 or where they fave act is in the albums or singles.


www.havenforum.co.uk

I recall a panel not so long ago where the MD of some ringtone company reckoned that a number one tune can account for over half of his sales in a given week. When you consider why people buy ringtones and who buys them, I think that's pretty significant.

As for the pop-i thing, isn't that similar to what bigchampagne are trying to do in the Sates?

FWIW I wouldn't bother with a postal vote. I'd look at spending the cash on:

Collecting DJ playlists from key clubs around the country.

Building an internet spider with an intelligent back end that harvests and analyses traffic around the artist - things like myspace hits (and the number of myspace accounts relating the that artist. People spoof popular people), flickr tags, forum posts, youtube traffic, P2P and torrent requests and similar buzz indicators around an artist.

If you could get that right, you could probably start looking to sell the data to offset development costs and maybe start buying in things like google search counts, ringtone sales figures, week-by-week gig sales information etc. Then sell it back to labels to help them steer their marketing campaigns.

All that secondary stuff would give you a much clearer picture of what's going on than sales alone.

Hang on, why am I giving away this idea? Gizza job JK, I'll make it go!

How about an e-m to KingOfHits@aol.com and I'll contact you direct.

...although probably quite too much

www.oneminutealbum.com

e/m to

oneminutealbum@aol.com