List of best-selling singles of the 1970s in the United Kingdom
| 1970s in music in the UK | |
| Number-one singles | |
| Number-one albums | |
| Best-selling singles | |
| Best-selling albums | |
| Summaries and charts 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 |
|
| ←1969 | 1980→ |
| Top 10 singles 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 |
|
| ←1969 | 1980→ |
Singles are a type of music release that typically have fewer tracks than an extended play or an album. Throughout the 1970s the UK Singles Chart was compiled by the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) from the sales data of a representative panel of record shops across the country, starting with about 250 shops at the beginning of the decade and increasing to around 450 stores by 1979. The "panel sales" data from each shop were then posted to the BMRB every week and a multiplication factor was then applied to obtain an estimate of total sales across the country.
This procedure led to several problems with the collection of accurate data: the ease with which the panel sales data could be tampered with resulted in repeated accusations of chart rigging or hyping (culminating in an investigation by the ITV current affairs programme World in Action broadcast in August 1980, which found evidence that the record label WEA had been guilty of chart manipulation); some stores simply forgetting to return their data some weeks; postal strikes in the early 1970s meaning data could not be sent back to the BMRB; and every year only one set of data was collected over the two-week Christmas and New Year period each. As this was normally the busiest sales period of the year, it meant many records that were high in the charts over Christmas "lost" large numbers of sales. Some record companies also claimed higher sales figures for their records by quoting the amounts shipped to record shops instead, although these did not necessarily reflect the sales within those shops.
Producing an accurate list of the best-selling singles of the 1970s in the United Kingdom has therefore never been a simple task because of the difficulty in obtaining accurate sales data from the period. An official chart of the best-selling singles of the 1970s was produced by the BMRB and broadcast on the UK's national pop music radio station BBC Radio 1 on 31 December 1979. However, this chart is no longer considered accurate due to the method of data collection by the BMRB and has since been superseded.
In September 2009 a special edition of the UK music trade magazine Music Week was published to celebrate its 50th anniversary. It included updated charts of the top twenty best-selling singles of each decade of the magazine's existence, based on the most recent information available from the Official Charts Company (OCC). The following chart is therefore the most up to date estimate of the top twenty best-selling singles of the 1970s, as published in the September 2009 special edition of Music Week, with sales figures for the top ten up until the end of 1979 as estimated by the OCC.
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