Official chart - La Roux "Bulletproof" [2]
Unofficial chart - Michael Jackson "Man In the Mirror" [11]

Man In the Mirror was as low down as #11 on the official rundown, clearly brought down by a lack of physical sales.

It does feel more apt than La Roux, so is the unofficial chart now a better reflection of the current music trend or was La Roux worthy of the top spot due to selling more copies across the board?

Does this also prove that the decline of physical sales has been exaggerated somewhat?

The official for me.

Love that song and I'm getting rather ratty with the MJ stuff.

The official chart at least ended with a MJ song, the hideous Ben

why is their 2?

I thought the official one mattered

years back when radio 1 was by counted by 'gallup' and then likes of other radio stations were unofficial who were the likes of the pepsi chart etc? the no1's were often different, but i always went with radio1 as the official chart!

The top 3 on the unofficial chart has been the same as the official chart for as long as I can remember.

It changed to a new format a few weeks ago based around iTunes but until this week they have both agreed as far as the #1 is concerned.

I just thought it was interesting for there to be such a huge difference, but perhaps it has happened before.

sorry im talking about years back as in the early 90s! when the unofficial charts that i hated, never played the whole top 40 etc, had ad breaks etc etc, there no1 were very often different to that of the offical radio 1 chart! it annoyed me so much!

At least back then there was a decent Radio 1 chart show to listen to. Not nowadays, although Scott Mills was alright tonight.

I'd rather listen to La Roux's song. I do like MITM and I have a high respect for MJ's music, but these past few days it seems that his songs are being played to death and it's driving me absolutely mad.

loving mj's songs! long live them!

History is not made at all. The charts have been around since 1952 and in the 1st couple of decades there were all sorts of competing charts - all using very small sales sample sizes, but non of them at the time were 'official'. In subsequent years one chart from the period was used as part of the 'official' chart history - the 1st in the 50s from NME and then from 1960 from Record Retailer (although the NME chart was still compiled and published) and then it was compiled independently and eventually morphed into the official chart as heard on Radio 1.

In 1984 local commercial radio decided to launch their own chart called 'The Network Chart'. It was also compiled independently by MRIB (Radio 1 by Gallup at that time), but used a smaller number of record stores than Gallup. If sales were sufficently large by a distance for a #1, then both charts would have the same #1. But there were several different numbers ones on both charts while both were running from 1984 to 1993.

From 1993 The Network Chart became the Pepsi Chart and then started to use the Official Top 10, so both charts were the same for the Top 10. When the Pepsi Chart became Hit 40 UK, that chart for a few months just used the Official Top 3 and then moved back to the official Top 10 - and Hit 40 UK has only just ended and become The Big Top 40.

It's not the only time this had occured on the Big Top 40 either. Last week La Roux was at #1 and the week before (the 1st week of The Big Top 40) was David Guetta / Kelly Rowland. Neither of those 2 were the offical #1 for those weeks.

Physical sales are now tiny, miniscule although the sales for new releases and those towards the top of the chart may sell completely disproportionately to the rest. So if the total sales across the board is 140 million a year and CD/vinyl is 4 million a year, but 15% is the ave share for the top selling CD - obviously that will skew things a bit. But it still means that the Radio 1 chart takes into account all sales whether they're from iTunes or all the other download sites and physical sales too.