Official Charts
British record chart company
The Official UK Charts Company Limited (formerly Music Industry Chart Services Limited and Chart Information Network), trading as the Official Charts Company (OCC) or Official Charts, is a British inter-professional organisation that compiles various official record charts in the United Kingdom, Ireland and France.
In the United Kingdom, its charts include ones for singles, albums and films, with the data compiled from a mixture of downloads, physical media purchases and streaming. The OCC produces its charts by gathering and combining sales data from retailers through market researchers Kantar, and claims to cover 99% of the singles market and 95% of the album market, and aims to collect data from any retailer who sells more than 100 chart items per week.
The OCC is operated jointly by the British Phonographic Industry and the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) (formerly the British Association of Record Dealers (BARD)) and is incorporated as a private company limited by shares jointly owned by BPI and ERA. It was formed in 1990 as the Chart Information Network by the BBC, BARD, and the publishers of Music Week. CIN took over as compilers of the official UK charts in 1990, and the company has continued in that role, as the OCC, since 1994. Before then, the charts were produced by a succession of market research companies, beginning with the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) in 1969 and Gallup, Inc. in 1983. Before the production of the "official" charts, various less comprehensive charts were produced, such as by magazine New Musical Express (NME) which began its chart in 1952. Some of these older charts (including NME's earliest singles charts) are now part of the official OCC canon.
European charts
In 2017, the OCC made a five-year deal with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) to compile the Irish Singles Chart, Irish Albums Chart and other Irish charts on behalf of IRMA.
In December 2020, the OCC announced it was taking over the contract from German company GfK, in compiling the French music charts for Syndicat National de l'Édition Phonographique (SNEP)/National Union of Phonographic Producers (SCPP) with the OCC taking over on 1 January 2021.
The public source identifies “Official Charts” as british record chart company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Official, Charts and British.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2072376. VIAF identifies the subject as 309833637. The Library of Congress control number is nb2014013953. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1994, 1969 and 1983.
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