CHART BEATS: A JOURNEY
THROUGH POP

As well as obsessively following the Australian top 50, I've always paid a lot of attention to the UK chart. I can't say I've been as...

The Osmonds. The Jacksons. The Pointer Sisters. Hanson. Jonas Brothers. Haim. Music history is littered with groups consisting purely of...

It had taken a while for Take That to break in Australia and the same was true for another boy band from that part of the world —...

Earlier in the decade, we saw how second generation performers Nelson and Wilson Phillips had achieved major chart success (especially...

Ah, remixes. It's a topic I've covered on more than one occasion in the past, but the power of the remix was never more evident than this...

One look at the new entries on the ARIA singles chart this week in 1996 tells you everything you need to know about how far Australia had come in embracing all different genres of music. Dance, rock, R&B, funk and whatever Def FX were... anything went. Unsurprisingly, my favourite of the new singles was the dance track, and although seeing club tunes on the top 50 was a regular occurence, Australia still lagged some way behind Europe in songs actually taking off here. As a re

When I compiled my list of favourite girl groups , one common trait stood out: line-up changes. It is the rare girl group that gets to the end of its career with all its original members intact. One thing was certain with Eternal, and that was that nothing lasted forever This week in 1996, a British girl group that'd started out with four members returned to the ARIA singles chart minus one. And eventually, they'd slim down to a duo. But for now, they were about to embark on

A decade is a long time in music, and for an artist to be able to sustain peak popularity for that long is the exception rather than the...

Nine new entries! That's what I call an exciting week in chart history. And the highest entry going straight in at number 1, no less —...

Regular readers will know my disdain for novelty records, but there's a different type of novelty I am a fan of, and that's when an artist does something out of the ordinary or unexpected. Björk finally made some noise on the ARIA chart This week in 1996, a singer who'd developed a following with a series of critically acclaimed but commercially underappreciated singles broke through in a big way thanks to a song that, on paper, sounded like a crazy idea. The execution of her

Back in 1996, the ARIA chart still shut down at Christmas, meaning top 50 fans had to make do with an unchanged countdown for three weeks. And unfortunately, the singles chart for the three weeks ending January 7, 1996 was hardly what you would call exciting, with one new entry that spent a single week at number 50. There wasn't even a new number 1, with "Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio featuring L.V. adding another three weeks to its tally, which now stood at 12 weeks, to fir