Been browsing through the iTunes top 100 songs for a while. Not planning on buying, just seeing if I’m missing anything. Having my head so buried in the podcasting cloud, I barely have time to listen to the radio anymore.

The answer was not much, by the way, although there were a few surprises along the way. What the hell is Neil Diamond doing in the top 100 downloaded songs in iTunes?

Really, this is the way the chart should always have been. Displaying the top songs that people are actually buying, not whichever ones are being heavily promoted at that particular time.

I can see some problems with the iTunes format in the various versions of songs. If you’re buying from a shop, you buy the single or the album and that’s your choice.

In iTunes, you can head there to buy the one song, which is effectively the single in our shop analogy. But you could buy the album version instead, but still just the one song. So does that count towards the songs place in the Top 100, or does it not? I’m assuming it doesn’t as you often find more than one version of the same title in the list. So, this may not be entirely fair.

But still, I’d rather see that songs are popular because they’ve been on an advert and people are snapping them up, rather than it being the one that has been plugged to death on the radio.