Music Ally

The UK Official Charts Company has announced a Top 100 downloads of “all-time” (all-time being since its download records began in September 2004).

It’s good news for Lady Gaga, who has the top-ranked song with Poker Face (779,000 sales) as well as third-placed Just Dance (700,000).

Kings of Leon have two songs in the top five too, while Leona Lewis has two in the top ten. Recent downloads are to the fore: of the Top 100, 46 songs are from 2008 and 21 from 2009, compared to three from 2004, two from 2005, 13 from 2006 and 15 from 2007.

The Top 10 All-Time Downloads chart follows below:

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X-Factor alumnus Leona Lewis is sitting pretty at number one in the UK singles chart this week, having sold 133,591 copies of her cover of Snow Patrol’’s Run.

The twist? Every copy was digital. It’s the fastest-selling digital-only single in UK chart history, apparently. It rounds off the digital year nicely for Leona, with her Bleeding Love single recently being named the biggest seller on iTunes for 2008.

Her new chart-topper wasn’t meant to be released as a single (so it’s said), but it went down a storm when performed on Radio 1 and ITV show The X Factor, so the Great British Public demanded its release. Although the fact that it’s been appended to a deluxe version of Leona’s debut album makes us smell a fish in that story.

It’s well-known that many of the most popular videos on YouTube are music videos – with the trend moving away from bedroom hairbrush-wailers towards official videos from signed artists.

ReadWriteWeb has been analysing the Top 10 All-Time Most Popular videos on YouTube, and says that six of them are music videos. Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend takes top spot with more than 103 million views, but is joined in the chart by Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love, Rihanna’s Don’t Stop The Music, Chris Brown’s With You, Timbaland’s Apologize, and Alicia Keys’ No One.

Of course, the dominance of the chart by music videos will only fuel the debate over how these vids should be monetized, and what share of advertising revenue is justified. Equally interesting, though, is that many of these popular music videos have had the ‘embedding’ feature disabled, meaning they can’t be posted onto blogs and other websites.