It was once the barometer of good music but had latterly become the home of bubblegum pop, novelty records and 15-minute stars.

Yesterday the music singles charts underwent one of the most seismic changes in its 44-year history.

From now on every song downloaded from the internet will count towards the weekly league table of hits, regardless of whether a hard-copy CD is available in the shops. The move is set to allow the hits of yesteryear to surge into the Top Ten.

Until now downloaded singles ceased to count towards the charts two weeks after their physical CD counterpart was removed from the shelves.

Yesterday Snow Patrol became the first beneficiary of the new system, with their July single Chasing Cars returning to the chart at No 9.

Industry experts say that the changes will become increasingly marked. Omar Maskatiya, charts director of the Official Charts Company, said: “The release schedule is a bit slow at the moment but it’s going to get a lot more interesting over the next few months.

“At the moment it’s just going to be the big-selling singles from last year, such as Gnarls Barkley and Snow Patrol, that are going to see the benefit. The challenge for record companies is to keep the interest in those records going. This will mean that there is more stability. Songs don’t peak and then fall away, and it does mean that older and more novelty songs will have a chance.”

Sales of CD singles have almost halved in the past three years, down from 26.5 million in 2004 to 13.6 last year. In contrast, sales over the internet doubled last year, to 65 million.

“In a sense the chart is supposed to represent what is popular at that moment in time, and so downloads play a big part in that,” Mr Maskatiya said.

Anniversaries of song releases could also play a big part in the new chart. This year marks the tenth anniversary of Elton John’s reworked tribute to the late Diana, Princes of Wales, Candle in the Wind.

There are 25th anniversaries coming up for a surprisingly large number of still-popular songs released in 1982. In that year there were No 1s for The Jam with Town called Malice, Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger and Culture Club’s Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? The Beatles’ back catalogue is also due to be digitised, raising the prospect of the Fab Four dominating the singles chart. Gennaro Castaldo, a spokesman for HMV, said: “If the Beatles’ songs were made available digitally, there would be such a rush to download them that a Top Ten made up entirely of their music would be almost guaranteed.”

What the industry wants to avoid is a situation where low-selling classic songs sit in the basement of the chart, preventing new talent from breaking through. Mr Maskatiya said: “What we’re going to do is to keep an eye and, if the classic hits are clogging up the Top 40, we’ll have to look at it again.

“We could impose a time limit or introduce a ‘breakers chart’ to show the new acts that could have charted if the old tracks weren’t in the way.”

The long tail

So, in Anderson’s words: “Those millions of niches are the long tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the short head of hits”

Source: Times database; Amazon; Wired