British artists set record with appearance on all top ten singles of last year

Ed Sheeran — who, for the past decade, was the winner in the end-of-year lists, which are based on streams and physical sales — had the second-highest selling song with Bad Habits, which was released in 2021 and was that year’s best selling single.

Styles’s album Harry’s House was last year’s No 1 album in the UK

KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES

His appearance on the Nigerian artist Fireboy DML’s song Peru, also originally released in 2021, was the third-best selling single while another 2021 Sheeran song, Shivers, was at number five.

Cat Burns, a 21-year-old pop singer from south London, was last year’s breakout star with her single Go — released in 2020 and peaking in the charts at number 2 in June last year — coming fourth in overall streams and sales.

Burns, who is a nominee for this year’s Brits Rising Star award, also scored the biggest debut hit of the year and the top single by a female artist.

The appearance of Kate Bush’s 1985 song Running Up That Hill on the Netflix series Stranger Things propelled it to number six in the overall end-of-year chart having been at number one for three weeks last year.

The song, which only reached number three in the 1985 singles chart, was streamed 124 million times during the year and has potentially been heard more during the past 12 months than in the previous 36 years combined.

Other songs in the top ten included Glass Animals’ Heat Waves, which was originally released in 2020 and has been hailed as one of the most successful ever “sleeper hits”, and the 2021 release Where Are You Now by the Belgian DJ Lost Frequencies, featuring the English singer Calum Scott.

The top ten is completed by the last year’s release Afraid to Feel by the Scottish production duo LF System, and Sam Fender’s 2021 release Seventeen Going Under.

Leon Neville, a director with the British Phonographic Industry, which represents record labels, said the featuring of British artists on all top ten songs was an “outstanding achievement”.

“At a time when streaming has created unprecedented competition coming from every corner of the globe, it is astonishing that in 2022 British artists were involved in all of the top ten calendar year’s biggest hits in the UK,” Neville added.

Kate Bush’s song Running Up That Hill featured in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things

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While there are concerns among musicians about the low payments many receive through streaming, Neville said the rise of platforms such as Spotify and SoundCloud had led to the eighth consecutive annual rise in UK music consumption.

Michelle Donelan, the culture secretary, said the top ten “clean sweep” demonstrated Britain’s “depth of creative talent”.

“It is amazing to see the breadth of talent from young artists like Ed Sheeran to music legend Kate Bush, showcasing the very best of British,” she added.

According to the data from the Official Charts Company — which declined to give specific figures for all the songs in the top ten — it now takes an average of 1.3 million audio streams to break into the weekly top 40 chart and around 7 million to land a number one hit.

Last year’s albums chart however had a more international — and dated — flavour.

While Styles topped the chart with Harry’s House and Sheeran’s Equals was number two, they were followed by four North American artists; Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Olivia Rodrigo and Eminem.

The top ten was completed by Elton John’s Diamonds, which was originally released in 2017 and features his greatest hits, Fleetwood Mac’s 2018 release 50 Years — Don’t Stop, Little Mix’s 2021 release Between Us, and ABBA’s 1992 greatest hits album Gold.

Britain has been a world leader in rock and pop since the Sixties

Without wishing to be jingoistic about it, we shouldn’t be surprised that British artists had a total domination of the ten most popular singles of the year for the first time (Will Hodgkinson writes).

Britain has been the world leader in rock and pop ever since the Beatles and the Rolling Stones took American rhythm and blues and gave it a twist back in 1963. Sixty years later Britain’s clean sweep of the singles chart shows how that cultural dominance continues.

The difference now is that streaming has transformed the way music goes out into the world. It certainly accounts for Ed Sheeran’s vast and, you could be forgiven for thinking, unwarranted success.

The Suffolk-born 31-year-old has understood how, in an era when most teenagers no longer buy music in physical forms, the key to global saturation is to infiltrate every possible genre and territory and collaborate with artists across the spectrum. Hence his pure-pop hit Bad Habits appearing alongside Peru, a collaboration with the Nigerian Afrobeat star Fireboy DML. The blandness of Sheeran’s efforts may leave you cold, but he has shown a sophisticated understanding of the way music is now sold.

British pop also leads the way in one of the biggest talking points of recent years: gender fluidity. It is hardly a new thing — Marc Bolan and David Bowie were getting in touch with their feminine side back in 1971 — but Harry Styles has done brilliantly out of presenting himself as a glamorous, unthreatening post-boy-band pin-up. His chirpy 1980s-tinged single As It Was, the biggest song of last year, was the perfect vehicle for that.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of 2022’s official singles chart is the way songs from decades past no longer fade into obscurity but can line up alongside a breakout hit such as Go by the newcomer Cat Burns. Kate Bush’s 1985 song Running Up That Hill was fated to remain a Generation X favourite until it appeared on the soundtrack to the nostalgic sci-fi TV series Stranger Things. Now there can be few twentysomethings not familiar with Bush’s art-rock fable about a man and a woman swapping bodies. Such is the power of streaming.