From TOTP fans to the TikTok generation 

Full Fat Things transforms the Official Charts’ website to increase revenue and broaden its market appeal.

About the Official Charts

The Official Charts has been part of the UK music scene since the 1950s when it was recognised as the  ‘official’ singles chart for BBC Top Of The Pops and the Radio 1 chart show.  The Official Charts company was formed in 1990 and today compiles charts for singles, albums and films across a variety of genres.

The times they are a changin’

The Official Charts has a loyal audience of music aficionados who appreciate the website’s depth of information, statistics and data on every artist, track and album. But the team also needs to embrace the video-hungry, mobile-first Gen Z market, and give them the online experience they’ve come to expect from apps like Tik Tok, Spotify and YouTube.

The Official Charts site was clunky on mobile and had a corporate feel. It had very little video content and failed to capitalise on video advertising, which is much more lucrative for them. It was failing Google’s core web vitals assessment and so falling down in the SEO rankings. 

The Official Charts team knew they had to optimise the site, make it much quicker to load with better audio and video, embrace new media formats and provide a lot more content for both its traditional audience and younger target markets.

Key objectives for the new platform: 

• to make the site faster for higher Google rankings
• to appeal to the TikTok kids while nurturing traditional users
• to attract more video advertising
• to improve integration with relevant sites
• to give users more of what they want.  

This is how we did it

We approached the project from both creative and technical viewpoints, and with a strong understanding of the organisation's B2C goals. 

We started with rich and interactive wireframes which they could click through to see prototype pages, showing how users could link to singles, albums, films, stat blocks, news articles and everything else they could want to find out.

We chose Drupal to create a platform that brought everything into one place — an incredibly flexible and easy to use front end and a powerful back end with media and information all in one database that’s much easier to access. And because the website doesn’t have to continually talk to another platform to get hold of content and data, it runs much faster than it used to. 

Building the site with a headless CMS means that the presentation is separated from the content management. So instead of filling in form fields and templates, content editors can use Drupal’s Layout builder to design new pages however they like, pulling in custom content components and watching it come to life as they build it up. There’s nothing stopping them doing what they want with the content they hold.

Everything and more

When the site relaunched, it had over 50,000 artist pages and 5.8 million chart position data points, along with 88,000 new singles pages, 79,000 new album pages, 55,000 new video pages that weren’t on the previous version. Users aren’t restricted to listening to one track at a time. They can have a whole chart playing with one click, giving more of a playlist experience and extending their time on the site.

The new platform has masses of new content with a page for every artist and for every one of their products — every single, every album, every video —and a much more intuitive UX that’s optimised for mobile devices.

Each singles page includes a 30 second video snippet where available,  along with links to buy the track on Apple Music or Amazon. The video-rich environment makes the Official Charts even more appealing for advertisers who know that video will pull in more page views than static ads. Needless to say, it’s a lot more tempting for Gen Z users who demand a video-first environment without lagging or long load times.

The scope of the content has increased, too. The Official Charts can now add new types of chart, whenever they want, ensuring it’s always up to date with the latest music and video releases and keeping it at the heart of the national music conversation. 

Other sites will be able to embed the charts into their own sites, pulling through not only the latest real-time chart data but also stat blocks for deeper information. So if a music title is writing about Lewis Capaldi or Harry Styles, for example, they could embed all the artist chart stats on the article page — how often they’ve charted, longest stay at number one and so on.  

Don’t you forget about me

The features that have made the Official Charts popular with music fans for over 30 years are still there: loads of facts, lots of statistics and informative news and opinion. A community of avid commentators on Disqus has been migrated over to the new platform, so the Official Charts will benefit from the page views, clicks and first party data generated by their discussions — along with the revenue from the ads served on those pages. 

A new login feature allows users to create a free account to curate their own preferences, and gives them access to email newsletters with the potential for more personalised content in the future.

Just what they needed

Partnering with Full Fat Things has given the Official Chart a platform that will refresh and maintain its position in the music business, allowing it to serve its traditional customer base and attract the new users that are so vital for longevity.

We looked at their ad revenue model and maximised the potential for attracting premium video advertising that would not only support the business but make it more relevant in a video-first music environment. And our creative and technical approach meant that content editors are in the driving seat, proactively adding new features and reacting quickly to breaking news. 

The new site is fit for the future and builds on the Official Chart’s history as the UK’s leading name in chart music. The only way is up!