‘The last gasp of musical culture as we know it'.
That's what I wanted to call this week's column, but it was too long to be a sensible headline.
Similarly rejected on grounds of not fitting in the requisite space – and not really being a headline anyway – was ‘The decline and fall of western civilisation (while we weren't paying attention).
As you can tell, I am less than 100 per cent cheerful and optimistic this week...
And the thing that has brought me, once again, to this state of despair?

The album is dead

In economic and cultural terms it has gone the way of the dodo. I will analyse its funeral in an upcoming column but in the meantime let's have a quick wake. A brief celebration of the silliness and fun that came with a few decades of long-players.
Because the UK charts organisation announced earlier this week that it had named the thousandth number one album since charts started being charts (which in the UK was 1956). That naturally threw up all sorts of trivia about albums, particularly number one ones.

It got me thinking that a thousand isn't a lot of albums. In fact it's a pretty select club.
Searching for data on how many albums come out each year the closest I got was Nielsen SoundScan who suggest that in 2011, 870,000 albums were released. Assuming that to be a conservative estimate it means that over the nearly sixty year chart span there have been... oh... a helluva lot of albums (did you really expect me to do a calculation?). Bucketloads. Bucketloads of bucketloads. But only 1000 of them have ever been number one in the UK.

So, how about that trivia (before the bit about the fall of western civilization)?
The thousandth album to become number one was Robbie Williams' Swings Both Ways. So what are we to make of the fact that the very first number one album in 1956 was Frank Sinatra's Songs For Swingin' Lovers? That swinging never goes out of style? That musical tastes have changed very little in 60 years? Surely the fact that the music has stayed the same while the artist has gone from Frank Sinatra to Robbie Williams is symbolic of something? Is this some sort of metaphor for the aforementioned End of Musical Culture?

Who knows?

More trivia: The Beatles had fifteen of those thousand number ones. That sounds pretty impressive till you hear that The X Factor was responsible for fourteen.
Although Pink Floyd had five number one albums, none of them were The Dark Side of the Moon, which remains the biggest-selling album never to reach number one.
Madonna has had more number one albums than any other woman (twelve). Impressively she has had number one albums in four consecutive decades.
Of ABBA's nine number one albums four were Greatest Hits sets.

Elvis Presley and Robbie Williams have had the same number of number one albums (eleven). Now about that decline of western civilization...
Since 1988 there has been a separate chart for compilation albums, otherwise the artist with the most number one hits would be Various Artists. Earlier this year, in its first week on sale, the eighty fifth edition of Now! That's What I Call Music outsold the entire Top 75 artist albums put together. (Did I mention the decline of... oh yes, I did.)
Despite charts starting in 1956 the first woman – women in fact - to top them wasn't until 1967. (Thank you Diana Ross and the Supremes!)
Between May 1963 and April 1965 the number one albums were by (in order): The Beatles, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones.

The longest-running number one album is the soundtrack of the film South Pacific. It was number one for seventy weeks from November 1958 to March 1960 (including the entire year of 1959), and then again in 1960 and 1961, giving it a total of 115 weeks.
The biggest-selling number one album of all is Queen's Greatest Hits.
We'll return to the Death of the Album in an upcoming column but, if any further proof was needed, the next number one, number 1001, due this Sunday, is One Direction's Midnight Memories. Q.E.D.