thanks but i already looked at the charts from 10 years ago. I know it wasn't all these types of bands around but at least they were in the charts.

But it's just the same today. When Oasis, Blur, Pulp et al were around the chart was mainly Boyzone, Take That, Spice Girls etc.
Now you've got Coldplay, The Darkness, Muse - but the chart is still dominated by crap pop (Blue, Girls Aloud, Westlife Pop Idol). No difference.

Audio single sales are pretty much dead at the moment.
Instead of selling music online i think it's time the record companies started selling DVD singles.
Dido for example has sold of albums but still hasn't released a DVD.
They'd get loads of sales if they sold the video's as DVD single's and could still sell a DVD with live performances and 1/2 albums worth of video's.

I don't know if it's possible, but how about a disc with audio that plays in a CD player and video that get's played by a DVD player?

I don't think it would be possible to have the video in DVD format and the music play on a CD player as the actual disc is a different format for DVD/CD. You could either have a CD with a music track and the video in VCD format. You would have around 600Mb for the video so at only four minutes long it would be reasonable quality (better than those tiny lo-res videos you used to get on singles).
Or it could be a DVD disc with the video at full DVD quality including full 5.1 sound and the single in audio format. It wouldn't work in a CD player but you could listen to the audio track on your PC or rip it to MP3 to use.

I would deffinatly buy a DVD single if it was for a track it liked with a good video (I currently don't buy singles - at least not for the past five years).

A music industry insider had told me (some years back) that the lowest selling number one ever sold just 12,000 copies - that being 'Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter' by Iron Maiden, back in January 1991.

In those days, CD albums had been out already for a few years, but most singles were only available to buy on vinyl. Given that most young people at the time, were listening to their music on portable cassette players - this posed a problem and resulted in poor sales!

Singles sales were appalling from around 1990 - 1992. In '93 when prices of cassette and CD singles fell to the level of vinyl singles, it kickstarted the singles industry again.

I feel that it is the same thing again - with prices of alternative formats now cheaper than the CD single, that is resulting in the same phenomena as the early 90's - and has little to do with the quality of music, as music has always appealled to the contempories!

Are these Audio DVDs ever going to take off (audio only type)? I would love to be able to buy albums at such high quality, with 5.1 etc.

No offence guys but you lot are TOTALLY OVER COMPLICATING THINGS!! The song is one of the least catchy number 1's i have ever heard. Never expected it to sell that much. I had a really horrible feeling when i was listeining to ''ready to go'' by republica which was infact not a top 10 single in 1996 that the quality of songs has gone down when a good song like ready to go only got to number 12 ....i think and that busted song got to numer 1.

Its all relative to individual taste, the people you mentioned at the top of your post I personally find objectionable and as for Eminem least said about him the better! You dont have to swear and be outrageous if you're truly talented! Its just that in this day and age the hinge that creaks the loudest gets the oil!

"Music is not as good as it used to be" reminds me of that Viz slogan "Viz, not as funny as it used to be" . Although that said, it's been a few years since I bought Viz .

I don't think we are over complicating things. By virtue of the fact that Busted only sold 30,000 copies, every track at a lower position in the chart has sold fewer than that as well, no matter how good.

It was interesting to read the same thing happened 90-92. I thought that was a golden age of single sales due to the rave era.

What would you guys consider good 'pop' music (as appose to rock, punk, soul, dance etc...)?

I know pop stands for popular, but what about pop as a genre?

I think one of the problems with singles these day compared to when I bought singles (70's) is that you really use to anticipate someone realeasing a single - it got no radio play (this is b4 the days of mtv) until the day of release so if your fav artist was due to release a new single you use to mob the record shop on the monday lunchtime to get it as soon as it came out and you had no idea if it was going to be good or bad the other reason for this was artists use to release a single before they released the album and it was unusually for more than one single to be released per album - maybe record companies should go back to this approach rather than releasing 6 singles from a 10 track album

a lot of asian CD albums already do this, they often have 1-2 pop videos on as well.