This week's Official UK Singles Chart
This week's Official UK Albums Chart
An all-static Top 3 on the Official UK Singles Chart for the second time this year means a third week at Number One for Ellie Goulding and her "50 Shades of Grey" soundtrack hit. The biggest selling song in the country is also far and away the most streamed one too as Love Me Like You Do becomes the latest single to set a new streaming record, its grand total of 2.58 million plays in the last seven days enough to obliterate the total managed by Uptown Funk last month.
"50 Shades" is also the source of the week's most significant mover as Earned It by The Weeknd continues its sympathetic climb up the listings, rising 10-4 to reach its highest peak so far. The singer has one other song on the film's soundtrack and that too appears to be picking up momentum with Where You Belong rising to Number 64. The Canadian singer also has a third single currently active, his duet with Ariana Grande on Love Me Harder. Despite being a chart single since mid-November it has yet to climb beyond Number 48 and now appears to have run out of steam completely with a drop to an all-time low of Number 72.
Sugar by Maroon 5 continues to climb the mountain too, the single now a Top 10 hit with a four place climb to Number 7. It is the group's 8th such single although its five-week climb to this current peak makes it the group's slowest burning single to date.
Although this is a column about what has happened rather than what could have happened, it seems remiss not to bemoan the way FourFiveSeconds by Rihanna, Kanye West and Paul McCartney stays locked firm at Number 5. A three-place climb would have meant the single had moved four-five-second which would have been quite poetic.
In a very quiet week for major new releases, the highest debuting single of the week arrives at Number 17. Revive (Say Something) is the second hit single for Luvbug, the latest project of former JLS singer Marvin Hulmes and the follow-up to Resonance which hit Number 13 in October last year. Singer on the soulful club hit is newcomer Mark Asari whose well-received mixtapes have been circulating online for the past couple of years. Consider this a soft landing which should lead to his own hits in fairly short order.
The week's other "new" hit isn't exactly new at all. David Guetta's collaboration with Emeli Sande on What I Did For Love reached Number 24 in December last year when the pair performed the track on an X Factor results show. Now fully promoted to single status the track charges back onto the chart at Number 20 and seems set for greater things over the next few weeks. It is worth noting that this isn't the first time a David Guetta single has had a brief chart run several months before its actual single promotion - he most famously charted with Titanium in the summer of 2011 before the track returned for a spell at Number One and an eventual million copies sold in the first weeks of 2012.
Sam Smith's trio of 2014 hits show little sign of fading away and indeed their similar level of sales this week mean that all three are bunched together on the singles chart, leading the artist to occupy positions 21, 26 and 27. He was also joined in the 3-up club by Taylor Swift but frustratingly her long-running hit Shake It Off dips out of the Top 40 this week after an epic 26 week run, just as her new single Style makes its bow at Number 36.
History in a sense is made this week with the publication of the last ever "old style" album chart just prior to the addition of streaming data. Pure sales alone then are enough to send Imagine Dragons to Number One with new album Smoke +Mirrors, their second studio offering doing enough to better the second place scaled by Night Visions back in 2013.
The other big new release of the week is Texas 25, a collection of re-recorded classics and a handful of new tracks to mark what is confusingly the the upcoming 26th anniversary of the release of the Scottish group's first ever album. The new collection lands at Number 5, the seventh Top 10 album of their career.
