Welcome to the APME Memphis 2025 conference. Here, you’ll be able to register for the conference and update your Sched profile. The conference schedule will be available in late spring 2025. At that time, you can view the schedule and select the presentations you’d like to attend. If you have any questions, please visit our conference website or contact us at conference@popularmusiceducation.org We look forward to coming together as a community June 4–7, 2025.
This research presents a critical examination of the UK Singles Chart (colloquially known as ‘the charts’). The research will consider how the charts present a cultural consensus on what is deemed to be popular and of use-value, the politics of challenging this consensus, as well as how charts influence popular music heritage and an understanding of the past. Charts encapsulate and promote cultural relevance and importance. For chart entries, it creates a historical context away its structural and compositional makeup. The story of the UK Singles Chart spans over 70 years of cultural history, and though the chart has served to reflect and influence popular music and societal shifts throughout this period, its function within popular culture is seldom explored directly in academia. This, arguably, is an unusual occurrence given how charts are crucial in both representing the taste of audiences while perpetually promoting chart entries even further. Though sales and consumption charts are not unique to the UK, the research will also detail how the British public embraced the charts as light entertainment, especially during its formative years, when charts were not just mechanism to present data but a weekly cultural event worthy of attention. 2025 will mark seventy years since ‘Rock Around the Clock’ reached number 1 in the UK Singles Chart – the first American rock ‘n’ roll record to grace the UK’s top chart position. Amidst fellow UK chart toppers by adult-orientated singers such as Eddie Calvert, Alma Cogan, and Rosemary Clooney, its chart success symbolized changing times, youth culture disrupting the status quo, with the charts serving to document and further propagate these revolutions.
