FEATURE19 October 2023

Signed, sealed and delivered: The Offical Charts’ CEO on music consumption trends

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Liam Kay-McClean

Features Impact Leisure & Arts Media People UK Youth

The Official Charts have been documenting music tastes for decades. With new platforms growing in prominence, chief executive Martin Talbot tells Liam Kay-McClean about how his job has become more complex – but fascinating.

photograph of Martin Talbot

F or a first gig, Stevie Wonder at Earl’s Court, London, in 1984, takes some beating. Wonder reeled off hits including Superstition, Isn’t She Lovely and Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours), as well as songs from his vast back catalogue.

Martin Talbot, chief executive at the Official Charts Company, was in the audience that night for his first live concert, and has remained a huge fan of Wonder ever since, last watching him on stage in 2019, in Hyde Park. But it is that 1984 gig that remains one of his all-time favourites. “To see an artist like that in his pomp, in the early 1980s and just coming out of his peak in the 1970s, was amazing, ” he says. “I didn’t grow up in a big city, so I wasn’t fortunate enough to go to gigs constantly throughout my teens. Stevie Wonder had a massive impact on me at that age.”

Fast forward four decades and Talbot is ...