TMT:89 Martin Talbot On Why The Charts Still Matter

Hello and welcome to The Money Trench, the music industry podcast with me, Mark Sutherland. We're back in London after our live show at Sound City and ready for another big week in the music biz. The Money Trench is supported by SoundOn, SoundOn is TikTok's all-in-one music distribution and promotion platform for artists and labels. Go to SoundOn.blogal to find out more and check out the SoundOn track of the week in the TMT newsletter. And The Money Trench is also supported by TXL, the honest ticket exchange and weightless helping artists own their audience and protect fans from touts. Go to TXL.com to find out more and check out the TXL gig of the week in the TMT newsletter. And we support Earth Percent, the music industry's climate foundation, checkearthpercent.org to find out more. And this week we're back in the studio of artist merch company Wine Our Music where we're joined by a true music industry insider. He worked at NMA and was the editor of Music Week during the upheaval of the Noughties before leaving to run the official charts company, where he was a non-mover for almost 20 years or 967 chart weeks to be exact. There, he oversaw the evolution of the charts as it moved from downloads and CDs to streaming and the final revival before leaving just a few weeks ago, now enjoying some well earned time off. Number one, please welcome Martin Tilbert. Thank you. Hi, Mark Aiding. Hello, Martin. Welcome to the show. How's your music week being? Do you have a music week in the year? Yeah. Yeah, it's been great, actually. It's just loads going on. Obviously, I finished, as you said, a couple of weeks ago. I tried to pack in a whole load of different meetings and try and go to a few events. And there's just so much going on. You live in London. There's just so much going on. And you can get gigs kind of literally every night of the week. And, you know, book events, you know, I went to a match on some book event last week. And I went to a couple of gigs last week and popped into my local record shop yesterday. So there's lots going on and lots of really good music out there as well. So I've been able to give myself some time to listen to a few albums that I maybe wouldn't have had chance to listen to before. Nice. So you keep yourself busy and the light of it, switch towns, promotion, presumably. Well, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that has been the kind of dominant event of the last two weeks. Certainly for me. Oh, yeah. Back again. It feels a bit weird because, you know, telling all your friends, oh, yeah, we're promoted to the Premier League again when, if you're not into football, you wouldn't necessarily have known that we dropped out of it a year ago. So, but yeah, it's amazing. And, you know, it's fantasy time at the moment for each fans. Three promotions in four years, all three of them clinched at home, you know, invasions of the pitch. You know, it's just, it's great. You did still lose the pump at the other week. Absolutely. We won't dwell on that. But instead, let's see what the rest of the music business has been up to with our roundup of the latest industry headlines. And our first story comes from Music Week, which reports that the likes of Ed Sheeran, the cure, and major music industry players have joined a fanfare alliance campaign calling on the government to stick to its manifesto pledged a ban ticket-touting, and there's been speculation that only draft legislation will be included in the King's speech, which could delay any ban by up to three years, Martin, your life, music enthusiast, and Ed Sheeran fan, aren't you? Where, how do you feel about ticket-touting? Oh, I mean, this is a really, really important story. It's, I mean, you know, the work that Adam Webb and the fanfare alliance put in to make this happen in the first place, to get the commitment from the government that they got back at the end of last year was incredible and a really, really important place in which the industry all came together. It's very few people in the industry who would have been against this or would not have been kind of amazingly supportive. So the consensus on this is pretty broad, and it is really important that we need to make sure that the government stand by their word, you know, I think punters have been victimised over the last few years, exploited by touts, and, you know, it's absolutely crucial that we get this, get this right. I think generally speaking, you know, live events are too expensive. The real problem is that it's all about the economics, isn't it? Because it's all very well, you know, being concerned about the price of tickets, but the price of putting on gigs is going up, and, you know, there's a certain event happening in the Middle East at the moment, which is obviously putting up the price of oil, which is, which will be putting an increasing pressure on, on artist's ability to make tools, make sense, but yeah, it's really, this is really important. I mean, given that consensus, why do you think the government is backtracking somewhat? Because this would seem like an easy, easy win, wouldn't it? You'd think so. I mean, you hear lots of talk coming out of government that, you know, they're trying to make so many changes over a short period of time, they're trying to introduce a lot of legislation, and there's only a certain amount of time for the legislation they want to put through, but the reality is that, you know, something's up to take a precedent, and you'd have thought, yeah, this would be a big winner for anybody who votes. I mean, that said, you know, there are a lot of people who don't really care about culture and don't really care about music, don't necessarily maybe understand where music sits in the kind of economic health of the country, and maybe they just don't see it as being being important, but, you know, we know different, and we know, you know, what musical culture brings to the to the exchequer every year, and how important it is to continue to support our grassroots talent, but a music and in, you know, various other areas of culture as well. Yeah. So, do you think the government will listen to Ed Sheeran and co? I'm not sure, actually. I'm not sure. I mean, I think it's really important to make a stand. Yeah, I'm not sure it'll make a massive difference at this particular point, but, you know, we're just going to wait and see, aren't we, and hope, and hope that they do see, you know, some kind of sense. I mean, you know, there's lots of local elections at the moment, and talking on the election day, for example. Exactly. Exactly. And who knows what will come out of that? The worry I suppose is that the government finds itself with much, much bigger issues to try and deal with, then, frankly, something which just affects live music, however important it might be to us, you know, and perhaps for the government, it might not be the first item on their agenda, you know, once the elections have passed. Yeah. Who knows? Well, no by Monday, probably when this goes out. But in the meantime, our next story, music business worldwide reports on YouTube's latest figures which claim that in Q1, the company saw its biggest courtly growth in non-trial YouTube music and premium subscribers both globally and in the US since its launch in 2018. But the company says its subscriptions revenue is now growing faster than its advertising revenue. Martin, people tend to think of the streaming business as Spotify and not much else. Is that changing? Do you think there's this show that the pictures are becoming a bit more diverse? Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, people do, when they think about streaming, they think of Spotify, I think particularly in the UK, and it is the biggest streaming service, a music streaming service that we have, but there are lots and lots of other ones, I mean, you know, in other, less developed markets or markets that are beginning to be developed, I mean, for instance, in China and in India and, you know, there are different services there as well. I mean, I think Spotify is the most recent numbers I saw Spotify had something like 300 million subscriptions across the world. The most recent number specifically for YouTube, Google, the Leo Cohen gave out about a year ago was about 120, I think 125, something like that. If you add up all the rest, you're talking about, you know, something like a billion subscribers across all the various different platforms, which is fantastic and it's great that that's growing. You know, there, again, statistically, there are about 2.2 billion households worldwide. And the great thing is that that shows that there is room for growth. And if the numbers are growing as we speak, then that is also really, really positive. Musician services are absolutely critical for the industry as it, as it looks, looks forward. I mean, I also think, you know, had funded services are very important as well. They offer an alternative to people and there will always be people who want their music for free, you know, and it offers an alternative for people who do want to access their music through those kinds of services, gives them an alternative to, you know, what none of us want, which is the return of industrial levels of digital piracy. So so yeah, overall, this is a, this is a really positive story, you know, YouTube is one of the many and it and, you know, the more, the more music subscribers that we can get on these services, the better. Yeah. I mean, you've spent the last 20 years pouring over the data, how big a deal is YouTube in the UK? How important is it? Um, it's, I mean, as I've, as I've said, it's, it's smaller than Spotify. Spotify is, it is, it is comfortably the most dominant service, but what you see is over a period of time, we see the, the evolution of all of these services and, and all of them, all of them growing. The actual fine details are, uh, uh, confidential and a car can share those, but, but you left now mine. I can't touch it. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, the reality, yeah, the reality is that, that any growth in this area is positive. And that final story comes from an obscure media outlet called officialcharts.com. Don't know if you're familiar with that, Martin, but it has the story that rock music has hit a nine year high in market share on the UK. A singles market rock was behind 22.2% of singles consumption in 2025. Second, only to pop its highest share since 2016. rock was also the biggest genre for UK albums after success for the likes of Sam Fender Sleep Token and the return of Oasis. Martin is the long awaited rock revival finally here. I'm going to think there's we've seen some shifts in the singles market. We've seen artists who are willing to walk around with guitars under their arms, you know, hearing in those charts in the singles chart. More than maybe they were a few a few years ago. It became a very beat-driven concept, the official singles chart for quite a long period of time. But it's all driven by releases. It's all driven by artists who engage with fans and who connect with with audiences. And you know, Sam Fender was obviously a really key one. Obviously we had our Aasis last year as well. They had they had some tracks in the chart, "Somber from the US" or "Count" in that particular way. And obviously on the album's front, you know, it's the album's chart has long been more kind of guitar or intated than the singles chart. But last year we saw Sleep Token, we saw young blood, we saw various other artists kind of breaking through as well. It's the beginning of a change in the cycle. I mean, it's just part of the cycle, I think. I mean, these things come and go and they grow. And, you know, personally, I don't really have any great affinity with any particular genre in that sense. Because, you know, if there's a winner and in this case, it might be rock music or guitar music, there'll be a loser potentially. And it may be that in 2025, there were more releases by guitar-driven artists. And obviously, Sam Fender is the big one in that in that respect. But fewer releases from kind of UK hip hop, for instance. So, you know, these things, it kind of comes and goes. I don't see necessarily a massive trend, massive surge that will suddenly see that the singles chart dominated by guitar music in, you know, the next two, three, four years, personally speaking. But that's just a personal view. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the growing markship in terms of the biggest hits, there's still very few records that you had to call rock in the upper echelons of the charts. I think when we talk about rock in this context, we're talking about guitar music, you know, and it is, it's very subjective. And, you know, yeah, I mean, we're not, we're not talking about Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath and, you know, artists of that ilk and we get even sleep token and those kind of artists getting to the top of the singles chart. That's not what's happening. It's just that there are more songs with guitars involved in them. And, and that's just having a difference in the moon. Yeah. And how does the OCC define rock? Is it is a very broad church as a go all the way from cold plate to death metal or, you know, how does it work? Well, it does. And beneath that, you've got a range of different kind of subgenres as well, kind of contemporary rock and heavy metal and, and so on and so on. So, yeah, it's, it's essentially music where it's, it's not electronically driven. It's much more kind of guitar driven, as I've said. So would, would like a livea, Rodrigo be classified as a rocker? You see, that's the problem and probably not. That should be considered to be pop. And Ed Sheeran would be considered to be pop. So a lot of pop also covers artists who one might consider to be rock or guitar orientated. It's very, it's very subjective. Okay. Well, fortunately, you don't have to worry about this. I don't have to worry about it. But there will, we'll see what happens. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thanks, Martin. And don't forget for even more music industry insights, sign up for the TMT newsletter at the moneytrunch.com. But now it's time to talk to this week's guest former official charts company CEO Martin toll. But Martin, you've recently left the official charts company after what I think we must officially call an epic run. How does it feel to not have to obsess over the charts every week? Or are you still doing it? I'm still doing it to a certain extent. I mean, I get, I get emails coming through and I've got access still to the on to the system, which they were, you know, the, the organization was very, very generous to allow me to have that. So I still look at the charts, still at the sales pressure every day. I can't quite get out of that habit. Yeah. It will take a little, a little while to to to be rewired fully. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's Swiss week, I suppose. I mean, actually, and that was partly the feeling, particularly when I having made the decision and when it was announced to the team and it was announced just generally as well, a real bit of sweet feeling. Because on one hand, really looking forward to getting out and actually kind of, you know, breathing fresh air and just kind of, you know, raise them head up and thinking about the industry, you know, more, more, more widely for the first time in quite a long time. But also, there was a lot of things I've, I was obviously going to miss, not least being involved in, in shaping the way that the industry has evolved over, over a period of time. And there's more evolution to come, you know, it's been a very, there's been a huge amount of change in the 18 years that I was there. And there will be more huge change to come in different, different areas. And also missing the team, you know, we've had an amazing team of people. The last two or three days were, were very emotional. And, you know, they're, they're, there was, I've got absolutely no doubt that, you know, that they can, I've got, I've got an amazing senior management team, Chris Becker and Lauren, who kind of managed everything on a day to day basis. And they will have, you know, they need to have their winks, you know, they need to go and do, you know, take them, take the business forward. And I've no doubt that they're really jobbing it. So yeah, it's, it's been, it's been interesting bittersweet. But yeah, it's been lovely to be able to get out and go and do things that I want to do, go and have meetings that, you know, meetings with people. I've got a couple of projects that I'm working on as well, which, which really, which really mean a lot to me, one in particular, I'm working with the Council of Research UK and setting up, it's basically pro bono work, but helping to try and set up as a senior advisor to Council of Research UK, music beats cancer as a, as a, an initiative to, to, to kind of engage the industry. So, so that's a really important. I've had a number of meetings about that. I've got another meeting later in the week about it. And the, and the aim is over the next few months to get more people in the industry to kind of be part of that. So if I can do any kind of advertisement, it will be if anybody wants to get involved, if anybody wants to support that on a voluntary basis, pro bono, but it's amazing cause I'm on LinkedIn. So drop me a, drop me a message. So yeah, there's a, it, so that's really exciting. And I've got one of two other things as well that I'm kind of mulling, percolating, while also trying to have a bit of a rest. Yeah, nice. And there's a, there's a revamp of the chart data system. Yeah. And there was you, you know, I have to worry about any more, but that sounds like a, that sounds like a big project. Yeah. And this is one of the reasons why, this is one of the reasons why I decided now was the time really. I mean, I, you know, I've been thinking for quite a while, that 18 years is a long time in anybody's career or, or, or life. And I felt that there was going to come a time where I would want to step away. And I would want to, you know, I've seen, I've seen the 60th anniversary and the 70th anniversary, the official singles chart, you know, the 60th anniversary, the official albums chart. I didn't want to see the, 80th anniversary of the official singles chart. So at some point, I was going to have to just kind of step away. It was, it was hand over to somebody, somebody else. And we're building this amazing new system. See, I'm still saying we, and that's going to take a while to, to kind of be, be, be ironed out as well. Just building this amazing new system that is going to be launched in the second half of this year. And it felt like there was enough of a gap to allow me to kind of step away and other team to pick up the project. There's going to be that will set on set in motion a whole number of different things, initiatives that we haven't, as an organization, been able to do before. And if I wasn't careful, if I was still around when that happens, there would never be a moment. So it just felt that was the right moment. And yeah, here I am. Congratulations. And when you joined in 2007, music consumption was very different, very so different. We didn't call it consumption. Yeah. Did we? What, you know, what were the biggest changes that you saw over that time? Yeah, I mean, it was, so it was only two, three years after a couple of quite big changes had already been already come through. One of them was the introduction of downloads. So I joined it 2007. So a couple of years before that, downloading two, three years before that, downloading it started to be incorporated into the into the single chart. Because you remember the back in those days that it was, there was a lot of, lot of opposition to how that should happen. The retail sector were very against downloads being treated in the same way as physical products. To the extent that there was a point in time when, when downloads were only allowed in the official single chart, if there was a physical version of the release already already available. So those kind of things. And actually, we think back now, it's something so kind of a lot of it. It's just a bit crazy, really. But, but of course, you know, people were protecting their businesses. And it was, it was understandable. On top of that, a couple of years beforehand was also when Top of the Popps was, was, was finished as well by, by the BBC. And the top of the Popps played an enormously important part in, in making the official single chart what it was back in the, in the 70s and 80s, particularly. Because if you think about what the official single chart was all, it is all about it was created in the 1950s. It really came into its own for the first time really in the 1960s. At that point, music was about teenagers. It was about young people. And therefore, the single chart was all about young people. We then had a period in the 70s and the 80s, where Top of the Popps piped the chart into people's homes. It became a much more of a family thing. And yeah, it, it, it, it, it had, it continued to be that I think right the way through to the 90s. But then in the, in the noughties, for whatever reason, you know, maybe it was that, maybe it was that downloading had not yet taken off. Single sales had declined slightly. Physical single sales had fallen away. There was a piracy issue. Top of the Popps wasn't working for the BBC. And therefore, they, they, they axed it. So, so coming in, there were, there were a number of different challenges. One of them was, was how do you, how do you, Build profile for this thing this official for the official singles chart without top of the pops Which had been so important and also we were at the cusp of not that we really knew it We thought we were at that we were thought we were in the middle of a kind of shift in consumption But there was another shifting consumption that was yet to come which made things even more complicated I remember actually so I was I Got the job and it was all announced in the summer and I wasn't taking over to October and I remember At being at an industry event. I'm Brian McLaughlin. It was an esteemed and you know amazing figure within the history of the UK music industry It was the chairman and the manager director of HMV for many many many years legendary Yeah, and I remember him him kind of grabbing me at some point because he'd been on the board of official charts Grabbing me before I took over the job and he was like, oh my goodness. Why are you taking over the job now? She doesn't 10 years ago. It was a lot more it not more straightforward then my goodness. I mean, you know It became much more complicated even than it was at that point to be honest with streaming coming in that that created That created challenges that that we that had never you know We never never previously seen because up until that point it was a there was a straightforward count Yeah, I mean it did change the whole model and it because the sales era completely somebody buys it whether it's a CD Seven enjoy downloads. Actually that counts as one thing. Yeah streaming the whole thing chain It suddenly becomes a ratio. It becomes a formula. It becomes something something very different But yeah, so when I when I joined in 2007 the singles market was kind of about 89% downloads 10% physical and by the time I left I put 99% streaming But and the the the bit that's missed out just by even making that statement is the growth of downloading in the period that that that I was the initial period when I joined the organization In 2012 was the biggest year ever for the history in the history of the UK music industry for single sales physical or digital When you consider that you know the number of singles eye downloads that were sold in that year were twice The number of singles that were sold in the biggest physical year of all time which in the late seventies so downloading Exploded, I mean just absolutely enormous and then within half a decade streaming came along and and suddenly now downloads, you know, I By vinyl albums and occasionally it says free download. I wouldn't even know what to do with it You know, yeah, that just seeing those kind of shifts it has is amazing incredible Yeah, and when streaming was in cool prices into the charts in in 2014 But it sort of changed the rhythm of the chart as well, didn't it in that songs would stick around for longer and You know the whole chart slowed down you have to change the rules several times to sort of adjust for this impact Didn't you how how was all that that must have taken a bit of a lot of meetings in Smoky back rooms to get some of those things through yeah, I mean lots of changes in a very short space of time as the industry Evolved and and changed over a, you know, very short space of time to realign itself with this completely different kind of consumption model You know and actually for labels as well, you know Just on just on a very basic level kind of understanding that And I remember having conversations with people at labels who were who were talking about when they should release their repertoire Within the streaming environment to maximize streams on day one because they were used to Making everything available on day one for the first time and then unleashing all of that volume in that one day But if you put something make something available for streaming certainly those early years you made something something available for streaming on day one of the chart You'd have a lower volumes than if you released it like four days before and helped it and enabled it to reach a kind of higher higher level So so there was a that this I mean essentially the changes within the market and The changes that we reflected within the singles chart and the albums chart changed everything for you know The way the marketing worked the way that PR worked the way the promotions worked You know how you how you dealt with retail, you know, I mean just everything was changed I mean the biggest changes we saw I Supposed work. I mean obviously putting putting a streams into the singles chart We had that particular week of course when Ed Sheeran dominated the charts and took up pretty much the entire Top 20 and then we we created a cap. So we introduced a cap So I know one could be Ed Sheeran's record of course as a fellow Of course that was the case and actually what's what's interesting is when you look back Over the years There have been very very few times when anybody would have come anywhere near close to that So I think at the time there was a real concern that oh my goodness this could happen every time there's a big album and Actually that would never have been the case But we were we were essentially reflecting consumption of albums as a whole and each of the tracks off off the off of from the album We're essentially singles as as we are as it's the case now and yeah, and I think the I think the industry is still realigning to that that new reality even as we speak I mean, you know, there was a time you know going back pre Digital or pretty streaming when you know, there was there was a standard model for an album release which is you know You release two or three singles and then you've dropped the album and then you release another single once the album is out to continue to promote the album And that's just completely changed now. So yeah, it is yeah, there was a it was a lot of change Yeah, so I mean with all these changes we've got accelerated chart ratio so that things don't stick around too long We've got a limit on the number of tracks and artists can have on the chart all these things Given all that is it is it still an accurate reflection of the most popular songs in the country? Yeah, 100% yeah, I would say it definitely is it is reflection of Of you know the tracks that people are listening to playlists play a different role now to the way that you know Promotion via retail you used used to play back and you know pre pre digital and pre streaming when You know if you release the track and it was supported but released a single you or release an album and it was supported by You know your local record shop or HMV or or or whoever you know There was still a choice as to whether you were going to go and buy that record and actually we were counting that one moment when you bought the record in a streaming environment It's a much more kind of drawn out and and stretched out form of consumption If you think about when you bought a single pre digital Pre-streaming, you know you'd buy the single and we would count that moment and it would be a value of about about a pound Essentially what we're doing now is counting each of the each of the listens over a longer period longer period of time And you know that in itself just slows the process down and playlists to play their part in that Yeah, I mean that we did have that week where Kate Bush had been on Stranger Things and was the most streamed song of the of the week But it wasn't number one because the ratio Harry Styles would still was still number one Does that mean there's still a few wrinkles in the system that needs to be ironed out? I mean, there'll always be wrinkles in the system because you know and and there's it's never going to be completely perfect But one of the things that happened immediately after that was that it was we had we adjusted the speed at which a track can be reset So there are rules which can allow for a track which is Surging and interest again to be reset back out standard ratio so it's treated the same as everything else and When the Kate Bush issue arose the reality was that there was a there was a time lag It was that it didn't happen immediately it happened the following week. What now happens is that if there is a surge of Interesting the particular track. It will be reset straight away straight away We had Chris Price on TMT the other weeks just in radio play He should be included in the chat which they do doing some markets. What do you think about that? We're always open and the organization is always open to consider these kinds of things radio play or I mean, there's been over the years. There've been various different kind of Models that have been proposed. You know should we include Social media activity should we include streams from tick tock for instance, you know short-form videos We don't currently do that at the moment and the main reason for not doing that is because a Essentially to a single stream has to be longer than 30 seconds for a royalty to be paid and we count the point at Which a royalty is paid so that's the data that is delivered to us so we're spotify an apple and an Amazon and so on and so on deliver us with the data They're delivering us with the number of streams that are generated to the point where royalty is paid and most tick tock Videos are kind of less are shorter than that on top of that a lot that a lot of tick tock repertoire Tits not just tick tock there are lots of other short-form video suppliers of course a lot of it is UGC or it's it's you know Music played in the background of something else that's going on and when video Streams were integrated within into into the singles chart and the albums chart. We didn't include any UGC either So that's the obstacle obstacle there, but yeah, I mean airplay We've looked up, you know, should be should be include jig box plays, you know, you're paying 50p for one track to be played to you or A pound for three track wherever you wherever the current rate is, you know, should that be played? I mean there's all kinds of possibilities, and the way that the, that the organisers kind of evolves all of that stuff is in consultation with the industry. So it's not, you know, it was never my job or my decision. It was never our operations director's decision or the operations team's decision. It was a consensus that was reached by the by the industry and, you know, for good or bad. And actually what's good about that is it does mean that that there is buy and buy in from the labels, you know, both the major labels, but also the independent label distributors as well who are part of that, part of that equation. Now, you love a chart battle. I'm asking don't you, when it can get very competitive when two artists or more to the point two of those labels fighting out to be number one, how often did you, how close and eye did you have to keep on some of the shenanigans that goes on when that's when that's happening? I think, you know, one of the things that makes us makes the official official charts company very different than the most other organizations around the world, the amount of time and effort that goes into policing all of that. Now, there's a degree of, yeah, because, you know, particularly in the albums chart, I mean, actually in the singles chart, it's less, it happens less and less. There's not a lot you can do outside of the rules within the singles chart. I mean, if you think back to seeing, you know, the good old days of the singles chart, the 1980s, the 1970s, you know, there's all kinds of horror stories. And actually I was listening to the podcast with Miles Leonard Cutler, weeks ago. He confessed. Well, you're talking about it. So, a big bag, I think he talked about a big bag of cash having to go around to shops. I don't think he was talking about handing the cash over to the, to the, to the shop assistant, apart from, to actually buy rep at buy stuff. But yeah, I mean, you know, there was a lot of that that happened in the 1970s and the 1980s. And the singles chart was incredibly powerful. And if you get to the top five, you know, that was, I think he, I think you said, this is what he said, you know, if you get into the, you get the top 40, you can get on top of the pop, you got the top of the pop, you can get into the top 20, you get into the top 20, you know, you can make a leap bit, even further up. And yeah, those kind of shenanigans are kind of all part of the, part of the rich tapestry of the history of the official singles chart. Today, you know, the singles chart is, it's completely computerized. And, you know, the data that is sent through by all the DSPs, I've just said, you know, 99% streaming. So you're talking about, you know, a handful of organizations who are sending us their data on a daily basis. And that is all being counted, and, and, and calculated. And of course, you know, there's always questions about, about fraudulent streams and note those kinds of things. But all of these companies, particularly if they are, if they are operating within a kind of ad funded model, you know, serving us, giving us data on, on fraudulent streams is much less of risky, frankly, than generating fraudulent streams, which are then sent to advertisers. That is a massive problem for them. And so they keep 100% on top of it. I have no doubt at all. Whenever we speak, whenever we spoke into the platforms, they were always, you know, they met, there were pains to say how vigilant they were and how important it was to stay on top of all of that stuff. And, and I have no doubt that they, that they are. But on the albums charts, there's, you know, on the albums charts, it's kind of as a marketing, I mean, you know, dozens of variants now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're all being, they're, they're being purchased. We have, we have really tight rules as to what you can, what you can bundle together. We had, we've had lots of moments over the last, you know, 15, 20 years when, you know, we've had, had managers from the US come to us to say, why can't we bake in a ticket to an album? In other words, why can't we give away a ticket with an album or give away an album with a ticket? And we're saying because we don't want to count ticket sales. And there are lots of acts who, who will do very well in terms of ticket sales, but what their albums don't do particularly, well, certainly the new repertoire doesn't do particularly well. And we don't want to be counting tickets. So, so we're very vigilant on that. You can only bundle together items if everything is available separately. And you can, and on the ticket front, the whole no purchase necessary model is really important. So, so you have to be, if there is a ticket, that is that you can get with a purchase of an album, you also need to be able to get that ticket for instance for an install or an out store. That needs to be available to purchase separately. Actually, with installs, with installs, you can bundle together a ticket with a, with a, with a product because our view is the numbers that we're talking about are relatively low. So it's not going to have an impact. So complicated, isn't it? It is. You must be glad to have left all this behind you. But let's, let's talk about the start of your career. Because you are, you were a journalist when in fact, you started on the Hackney Gazette, apparently reporting on a murder every 10 days. And then you went to reporting on the music industry for music week, which was, which was worse. And they were, both equally interesting actually. I mean, you know, I, yeah, the Hackney Gazette was a great grounding, did a bit of sport there as well. There's been a politics. I was only there for three years, but it was a, it was a, you know, when it's your first job, you learn a hell of a lot in a really short space of time. And, and, and that was a, that was a fantastic, fantastic grounding. I remember when I went to music, I went to music week. Steve Redmond was the editor. Selena Webb was the features editor. Nick Robinson was the news editor. All of him was still in the industry today. What a cool. And what, yeah, absolutely what a dream team. It was an amazing time. And it was fantastic to be involved in that. We, you know, connecting with, with Tony Wilson and in the Citi as well in 1991, 1992. I think was the, with the first one, was an amazing conference, loads of stuff happening. George Michael suing, you know, Sony music, CBS, whatever it was called at that time. Yeah, the BPI MCPS Tribunal hearings. I mean, just lots and lots of stuff happening. Very, very exciting time. And actually, you know, in the late 90s, I remember that, you know, writing stories about supermarkets, you know, breaking into the music sector. So selling CDs for the first time. And, you know, and pushing prices down to below £10 per CD, that kind of thing. I mean, it was a very, very different era, very different era. And then how long came piracy, of course, and the digital environment completely thanks, everything? Yeah. And then you, I mean, you left music week briefly and you went to work at NME, where we worked together, in fact, in the sort of chaos of the proto-Britpop era, I guess it was at that stage. How did you, how did you find that? I wasn't long at the NME. Actually, I was, I worked on the news desk. Again, with really great people. Yes, and George was the news editor at the time. And he was fantastic and learned a lot from Yes, I suppose what I found after a very short space to time was that news for the NME, a really good news story for the NME was, was getting exclusive on the blur tour dates. Which wasn't really what I got into journalism for. I wasn't really doing a lot of, one or two, you know, artist interviews, but I wasn't really doing any of the really exciting, interesting stuff for the NME. Sadly, it was amazing to be there and actually to be inside, inside that organization and to see how that all operates. It was incredibly educational, and I learned how to a lot. But yeah, it wasn't really the most, wasn't really the most exciting environment in terms of the work that I was doing. So I got the offer to come back to music week. I had, I'd left music week essentially because I'd applied for the job as news editor, didn't get it. And so in a fit of peak, I took another job that was available. Steve Redmond exited that decision presumably. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he, you know, he saw the error of his ways and came back and offered me the job a couple of years later. So, so I went back there doing, doing that job. And obviously, and, and after that subsequently got the opportunity to to edit a pan European music industry magazine called Fono, which, which survived for about five years, and that was great. That was a fantastic experience. And, and, and I got to see a lot of the international environment and, and meet a lot of people in the international marketing departments, but also trade associations got a real good handle on all the charts that were being compiled around Europe. Got a real census, which came back, or came all the way back around a few years later. Got a real sense of actually what the charts meant in the UK versus what they didn't mean, in the other markets. You know, the, the, I think, I think the, the charts in the UK are not valued by the industry in the way that they should. They have an enormously important role to play within the kind of cultural landscape here in the, here in the, here in the UK. They have a position that they don't have anywhere else in the world. If you go to Spain or to Germany or to the Scandinavian countries, the charts don't mean anywhere near what they mean here. And actually the, the, the service that, that the official charts provides for the UK market is considered to be gold standard around, around Europe and the world. And it really does have, yeah, it does have a really, really fantastic reputation. And I think we underestimate what an amazing job we, we do as an industry. Well, actually, what was, you know, nothing to do with me, the decision that was taken to set that organisation up in 1994, to create charts, have them owned by the industry, to use that as a means of generating really, really high quality consumption data for, for the industry as a whole. I was a masterstroke and we still benefit from it today. If you talk to any of the major record companies, any of the big music industry institutions about the data that they can get on markets around the world, the view will be that the UK, the data that we see in the UK, provided by the official charts company, is the best there is. I think it's something that is not said quite enough and I don't think necessarily there's the awareness of that. So if the industry doesn't appreciate you properly, but you know, you're former home properly, what about the public, because now when we were kids, but it seemed like the whole country knew who was number one in the charts any one time. Now, you know, when I talked to my students at the University of Hertfordshire and I say, do you know who's number one in the charts? They never know. No one knows who's the number one in the charts. Does that mean the charts don't mean anything to people anymore? No, I don't think it does at all. You know, the charts, the charts mean different things to different people. You know, the, what the chart, the residents of the chart back in the, in the 70s and the 80s was partly driven, as I've said before, by the power of top of the pops, you know, the chart was piped into people's homes. Awareness of it is not as high as it was in those, in those years, nor should we expect it to be. You know, it was a, the chart was a thing that was owned, that was, you know, acclaimed by, by people of all ages, and it's, it, it, it just has a different profile today. It's still, it still tracks a lot of attention from consumers. We can see that through the engagement of those consumers on social media on officialcharts.com. I mean, you know, when I first joined the chart company in 2007, there were three shifts in, in the, in the cultural environment that we needed to respond to. One of them was the, just generally, the way that consumers were, were engaging with music and were consuming music. We talked about that. The internationalization of culture, which was, in its very, very early days, but we were beginning to see the kind of the UK-based retail environment become, start to be replaced by digital platforms, which were owned internationally and were owned by international conglomerates, rather than, you know, locally. So that was another, another really important thing that we needed, we needed to try and factor in. The third was this kind of shift in, in, in the way that the media were operated, and the media operates. Part of it, you know, was also driven by the fact that, you know, the charts were a white label, essentially white label operation, and we provided the charts of Radio One to the BBC, and it was very much felt as seen as the BBC chart. Suddenly we lost a TV outlet, and what we decided to do was we wanted to try and create a brand in its own right, something that encapsulated what the official chart was, was, was all about. And that brand journey kind of began in 2011. So we were kind of trying to work out what we wanted to do. We had one first attempt at a rebrand, which wasn't massively successful, and then we tried it again in 2011, and we created the Kitemark, the, the, you know, the two arrows in a one. Some people still don't see the one. Some people still don't see the arrows actually, but the icon that now is part of everything that official charts is about. That enables us to create the, the number one award, which enables us to create content, it enables us to create kind of visual material, which we could then use, and it could take out into the, into the consumer space, McCreated, you know, the award itself made a moment of, of, of being number one of the charts, we now have an award for getting to top 10 in the official singles chart, the official albums charts. I can't tell you quite how enormously popular those things are. We've given, we've given awards to more than 1,000 artists now, and, you know, you, when you go back to 2011 and 2012, 2013, the commerce team, we're trying to get artists to take the, the awards and have their photos taken with them and that created kind of all this, all this media exposure. Was it the heart? That was, that was at the heart of all of our media exposure. I mean, now we don't even have to kind of ask, they, they'll be, you know, that where Taylor Swift has, you know, an award at her home, so that she can have a photo taken with it every time she gets a new number one single or number one album. Every other week. It's exactly, Ed Sheeran has bought dozens and dozens and dozens of awards to go in his studio, in his homes, in his box at Portman Road, for instance, you know, that award now has been placed in the hands of, you know, everybody from the Rolling Stones and Port McCartney, Barry Gibb, right the way to Sabrina Carpenter and, and Chapel Rowan and, you know, Harry Styles, One Direction, etc, etc, etc. We now have an amazing gallery archive of images of some of the biggest artists in the world holding the branding of the official charts company. That model has been borrowed, stolen, you know, by lots and lots of other markets around the world now. That's been an enormous success and that only works if the artists feel that it has value to be number one in the chart. If artists want to be actually top 10 in the chart, what we're now finding more and more is that we launched a specialist award about two years ago, two, three years ago. 50% of the awards now that we hand out are specialist awards and it is part of the business that now exists, are selling the awards, but essentially we give an award to every every time a new a new record gets to number one. So, if Ed Sheeran goes to number one, we present him with an award, he has that to keep. He then wants to buy some more for his other properties. He can do that. If you're a member of a band, we provide you with one award. If there's four of you in the band, you can buy another three awards if you wish and you can give them to the rest of the band. That has become an incredibly important part of what what we do as an organisation. And I mean nowadays you've got to spotify global charts, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think the UK singles chart is always going to matter? Is it always going to be with us? I think yes, I'm without a doubt because at the moment, Spotify is one of the biggest platforms, but there are lots and lots of other platforms. We've seen even over the last 10 years, we've seen digital services evolve, we've seen, yeah, I think it will always be the case. I mean the other thing as well that is really important about the organisation. Everybody considers it to be a chart organisation. Of course, charts are the heart of everything that it does. It's essentially a data business. It is a data business that uses the charts as a means of creating profile for the data that it provides to the industry as a whole. And that's absolutely critical. There are over a hundred companies in the industry that subscribe to the data. It is gold standard data. It's better quality data than you will find in any other market around the world. And that's one of the reasons why France have come to us and asked us to take over their charts. We now do the charts and the data for Ireland as well. And there are other markets that are knocking on our door for us to potentially take on similar roles for them as well. Fantastic stuff. Right, thank you Martin. Please stick around like Brian Adams at number one for latest or greatest, which is coming right up. If you're enjoying the money trench supported by sound online ticks or please give us a rating or review on your podcast platform of choice as it really does help us keep making this podcast. But now it's time for a quick far round with our guest Martin Tolbert. Martin, this is called latest or greatest. You can decide to talk about either the most recent or the all-time best music biz thing that you've experienced in these categories starting with appropriately enough. The latest or greatest record that you've bought, hopefully in the chart eligible shop. Yes, so the latest record I bought actually was yesterday. I went to my local independent record shop in Layton Dreamhouse Records and picked out the new Necap album, which I think is really amazing. I think for number one, apparently. It is in contention. You have fingers crossed. It will certainly be top five I think by the end by the end of the week, which is great. I think the last album didn't even reach top 40. To make that kind of achievement would be amazing. I also ordered the Jessica hoop album, which is also very good. Fantastic stuff. The latest or greatest gig or festival that you've been to. The latest was a Tyler Ball game last week at Scala, which was great, really good. The support actors I talked about him in a minute because he was my tip. I thought it was really good, but yeah, that was a really, really great event and the album is absolutely if people haven't heard it. It's my album of the year at the moment and I would 100% recommend people give that a listen. It's fantastic record. It is great. You're latest or greatest music biz boss. So this was really difficult. I found this really difficult, not least because I've had so many of them and actually my latest music biz boss at charts. So I had three all the time we see. So as an organization because the official charts is owned by two train associations, ERA and the BPI and there was a non-exec chair at all times. So at any given time there would be three three bosses. At least that was the way that I always kind of viewed it. I mean the board was essentially my boss, but I always looked at those two chief executives and my chair. And there was an amazing array of chairs. My first chair was David Joseph, who obviously everybody knows and he was an amazing advisor. Somebody had always had a good piece of advice to pass on, but I had loads of other really good ones as well, called a Marshal. It was a chair at one point, Paul Firth at Amazon was a chair at one point, a Charlotte Burke holder at Sony, and he was a real rising star of the industry, who was our chair at one point. And my most recent was Drew, Drew Hill, who also, again, you know, amazing. And somebody who has been through lots of change at his company over the last few years and helped grow proper into what it is. And yeah, again, you know, amazing, amazing supporter. But I suppose I ought to give most credit to Jeff and Kim, Jeff Taylor and Kim Bailey. They were the chief executives of BPI and ERA respectively for most of the time that I was there. Jeff is an amazingly calm, astute, very always had wise counsel. I was just, yeah, very, very smart and I was incredibly grateful for that support at many, many times. And Kim has done amazing things at ERA. When you think that, I mean, so she, she's been at ERA for longer than I was at charts. So she saw through, she was in those early years when downloads were first being introduced into the into the singles chart. She was the one who was having to manage that whole kind of that really complicated set of circumstances where retailers didn't want digital to count unless a physical was available. So she has navigated challenges like that. She's helped take an organization which was all about physical retail into a completely, into a completely digital arena or a much more digital arena and always calm, always got a word of advice and support and so on. So I would, I would say Jeff and Kim were probably my two or two best bosses. I'm claiming two because because I never had just one boss while I was at charts. Fair enough. We'll let you go over there. But the latest or greatest mistake that you've made. So we all make mistakes all the time and it's very difficult to try and isolate one of them. And that isn't just because, you know, I don't want it. It's not that I don't want to submit to mistakes far from it. They've just always, they've been so many over the years. I mean, lots of different ways. And the one that really sticks to, the really one that really springs to mind was when I was at the Hanne Gazette back in the late 80s and I was doing a bit of sport and I was covering a match between Arsenal and Southampton. And Paul Davis, who was a, who was the Arsenal central midfield player and kind of playmaker, basically put one on a player called Glenn Cockerle, broke his jaw basically with a punch. I totally missed it. I totally missed it. I filed my copy, had no reference to probably the biggest moment in the game. And obviously it's a very different kind of era. And yeah, that was, that was my, that was probably my greatest mistake. But I think, you know, I, I think mistakes are good. I'm a really big fan of a guy who called Rory Sutherland, who people might have seen. I don't think he's of no relation. No, sadly. Rory Sutherland, who was a human behaviorist, works for Ogilvy. And he is an incredibly insightful person about the way that human, humans engage with, with advertising and, and messaging and so on. And he makes a really, really good point about rationality versus irrationality. And how businesses that are driven and focused by rationality often don't succeed. Because creativity comes out of irrationality, comes out of the crazy ideas, comes out of the thing that you don't necessarily think of. You know, he, and he says this thing is quite weird. He says that spreadsheets leave no room for miracles. So I think you have to make mistakes. I think you have to try new things. I think you have to do, to do things that, that may not be the most obvious solution to, to, to, to innovate. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm awful. I can say this now. I'm all for mistakes. I think, I think it's important to, to, to be, to be willing to make them. Because if you don't, if you're not, you become too, you can come in too enthralled to the, to the, to the, to the, you know, to, to the lawyers and the accountants and all that stuff. Okay. Well, that's good news for, for the rest of us. Yeah. Now, the latest or greatest artist that you've worked with, I guess you weren't directly with them, but the charts, you would have interacted with a lot of artists. Yeah. I mean, this was, this was probably the most difficult of the lot really, because I don't really work with artists. I've never really worked with artists. We've, when I was the enemy, I didn't interview artist per se. And I'm not an A&R man. I don't work in a record label. I'm not a manager or anything like that. I suppose, I suppose what I would, what I would probably throw out there is, is my best experience with an artist. My best experience with an artist with, with an artist was in 2012, when it was the 60th anniversary of the official singles chart. I found an excuse to go and do a few interviews because we didn't actually at that point have a team that could do interviews as such. And being a journalist, I'd like, I'm going to, I'm going to do this. And the one, one of the ones that I did did a whole bunch of them, some of them on the phone, some of them in person, the one that really sticks out for me, for a number of reasons, with Lisa Marie Presley, who had an album out at that time. And as somebody who, who was the daughter of one of the, one of the greatest music icons of all time, and the former wife of probably one of the other greatest icons of all time in Michael Jackson, I was absolutely astonished by just how open she was to talk about anything. And she was not kind of, there, there was no kind of sense of frustration or annoyance that I was asking her about, about her father, you know, I mean, how often do you get to be that close to somebody who, who is the, you know, who has any connection with somebody of, like, you know, somebody like Elvis? So yeah, I think that's probably the one that's, and when people say to me, you know, how to use the person you've been most kind of starstruck by that's definitely the one as well. But she was just amazing, just so lovely and, and it wasn't, and she actually had her own record out at the time as well, which was actually relatively good. I'm worth checking out. - Nice one, nice one, Lisa Marie. And the latest or greatest music industry party that you went to see you at music week at the peak of record company, Lars Jess, I would say. So you must have been to a few good ones. - Yeah. I mean, the, the ones that stick out. I remember going to, to a, to a post gig party, Barbara Streisand performed at Wembley Arena back in the mid 90s. Obviously, side to Sony. And they carpeted Wembley Arena. So all of those horrible kind of concrete stairwells where it had carpet in them. It's just bizarre, a crazy, crazy. And then they had the, and the after party was in a TV recording studio, not just around the corner. And, you know, there were, there were almost as many ice sculptors as there were people. I mean, it was just nuts. That was, that was, that was crazy. I also remember going to Kylie's 30th birthday party at the Sarderson, just from the corner from here, in the, in the late 90s. - First of invitation. - Yeah, no, no, it was a personal invitation. I was trying to work out who must have organized that because actually when I looked at, I looked up the details of the dates. And I, and actually, you know, she would have been between a BMG and EMI at that point. So goodness knows who set that up. I thought it was EMI, but maybe, maybe it wasn't. But probably the most crazy, ridiculous thing that really sticks in my mind that I ever remember a record company doing back in those days was, you know, you'll remember in the 90s, all of the major labels had these amazing sales conferences. And you got taken all over the place to them. And I remember being flown to Miami to go to the Sony Music Sales Conference. And Bruce Springsteen was at the dinner. And it's just mad, just mad, just crazy stuff. But the one that I remember most was Bryan Sony had their conference in Brighton. And they decided that for their party that they would hire the entire, the entirety of Bryan Pier and everything would be completely gratis. And so you can literally walk up and down, do, you know, go on the dodgems and popcorn and all this kind of stuff. And it was just nuts. In some ways, I kind of, I wish, I wish those days hadn't gone, but at the same token, it was so incredibly wasteful. I'm glad I saw a little bit of it, but I'm also glad that, you know, that we don't do those kind of things. Well, I'm hoping they'll be doing that the great scope and next week, but we can't let you go without giving us the new music tip. So he's still looking out for new artists. So a Tyler Borgat, I was saying a Tyler Borgat game last week, there was a guy supporting him who I thought was really fantastic and I'm called Truman Sinclair, who is from his American bit country, bit Bruce, solo artist, at least he was on the stage. He did say, this is a song I usually play in my band and it's slightly different. He's playing the great escape as well. So definitely worth checking out if anybody is at the great escape. Next time we'll we will check those out, but that sadly is all we have time for, a big thank you to our guest and the one on that, Martin Tolbert. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. The money trench, the music industry podcast with me, Mark Sutherland. He's supported by a sound on a tixle and in support of a percent, it's produced by a tape note and exec produced by Mike Walsh with huge thanks to Senheiser, the fourth pillar, and our friends at DBA Digital for our social media. The Money Trench music is by the brilliant Tom A. Smith and to get in touch with us, please email [email protected]. And special thanks this week to Why Now Music for the Studio Why Now is an entertainment company built around artists and their fans, offering a one-stop solution across merch, content production and audience management. Check out WhyNowMusic.com for more info. There's another huge week in the Biz coming up, it's great escape week for a start and TMT will be heading down to Brighton where I'm hosting a conversation with CD Baby President Molly Newman on Thursday lunchtime to see you at the beach. Our next TMT Tuesday is also coming up on May 19th at the Victorian Dolston, it's officially sold out, but drop us the line, we'll see if we can get you on the guest list. Elsewhere Music Biz kicks off in Atlanta, Eurovision is on and there are big gigs for Steven Sanchez, Bleach 9-3, Coden Gray, Rose Gray and the Lottery winners and if you're in it to win it, TMT will return with another brand new episode on Monday, May 18th with another top exec in the hot seat, could be you. We will see you then Martin, thanks for coming on the show and keep us informed on your next moves. We'll do a thank you mark. Cheers.