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For almost 70 years, music artists have waited for the Official Singles Chart to find out if they’re the new number one.

Whether it’s singles sales or streams, the biggest song of the week has been announced on a Sunday, or in more recent times, with Scott Mills on a Friday on Radio 1.

Almost every music fan will know one key fact about the chart - whether it's the fastest selling single of all time, the song that stayed at number one the longest, or which artist took over the top 20 for a week.

����ý Bitesize counts down some of the unusual and historic chart-toppers of the past seven decades.

Who was the first number one in the charts?

While music charts had been published in the United States since 1940, it took another 12 years for the first official UK number one to be announced.

Before music newspaper the New Musical Express (NME), decided to run the first chart on 14 November 1952, a song’s popularity was determined by the sales of its sheet music.

The NME’s co-founder Percy Dickins contacted 20 music stores to ask them for their 10 best-selling songs. The first chart counted down the twelve best-selling singles of the week.

Al Martino’s Here in My Heart was the first-ever number one and stayed in the top spot for nine consecutive weeks. The record for consecutive weeks at number one belongs to Bryan Adams, whose 1991 power ballad (Everything I Do) I Do It for You topped the charts for an incredible 16 weeks.

Heard this one before?

Unchained Melody has become one of the most recorded songs of all time. It’s thought that almost 700 artists have recorded the track, which first appeared on the soundtrack for the 1955 film Unchained.

Later that year, in May, four versions of the song reached the top 20 in the UK. Recordings by Al Hibbler, Les Baxter, Jimmy Young and Liberace all charted at the same time – the only time in history the same song appeared in the chart four times in a single week.

Young’s version actually went to number one several weeks later – the first of four times the song has topped the charts. Recordings by The Righteous Brothers, Robson & Jerome and Gareth Gates also reached the top spot.

That means Unchained Melody also holds another chart record – it’s one of just three songs to be number one on four occasions. Alongside Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas, the tracks have topped the charts four times with four different sets of artists each. The classic football anthem Three Lions by Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds has also been number one four times but is the only song to do so with the same artist line-up.

Highs and lows

It’s fair to say there have been some extremes within the charts since 1952.

Sir Elton John’s tribute to Princess Diana, Candle in the Wind 97, still holds the record for the fastest selling single ever – with 1.55 million copies bought in the first week.

Nine years later, another record was set. Orson’s No Tomorrow sold just 17,694 copies – still to this day, the lowest ever weekly sales for a track to reach the top of the charts in a pre-streaming era.

It’s not just the sales that have seen a huge gap between the highs and lows. In 1998, Oasis’s song All Around the World went to number one with an unprecedentedly long runtime of nine minutes and 38 seconds.

The shortest song to ever top the charts is Adam Faith’s 1959 effort What Do You Want, at just one minute 35 – meaning you could listen to his song six times during the Oasis track and even have eight seconds to spare.

King of the charts Ed Sheeran

Of course, in the modern era, the idea of going to your local record store to purchase the latest single is a thing of the past.

In 2006, Crazy by Gnarls Barkley became the first song to go to number one based on downloads alone – around a year after digital sales were first included – while Ariana Grande’s 2014 hit Problem was the first to top the charts with streaming figures included.

Music streaming platforms directly led to one of the most unusual chart countdowns in history.

In March 2017, following the release of Ed Sheeran’s album ÷, all 16 tracks reached the top 20 – with nine of them in the top 10.

The Official Charts Company later changed the rules so an individual artist or band could only have three songs in the top 100 at any one time.

It’s not the only time that Ed Sheeran has made chart history. His 2014 song Thinking Out Loud went to number one on 8 November – 19 weeks after it first charted.

That’s the longest it’s ever taken for a single to climb the charts to the top spot. The song eventually spent an astonishing 119 weeks in the top 100, but that’s not a record. Mr. Brightside by The Killers, originally released in 2004, has been in the top 100 on and off for over 290 weeks and counting – more than five and a half years – but has never reached number one.