The UK music Industry

The UK music industry is represented by:

  • The Official UK Charts Company (Formerly known as CIN)
  • Music Industry Chart Services (MICS)
  • The British Association of Record Dealers (BARD)
  • The British Phonographic Industry (BPI)

Ranger provides computer technology and services to the UK Music Industry, mostly as a sub-contractor working within long term agreements between industry bodies and prime chart contractor Millward Brown International (MBI).

image of boy with headphones

Chart Data Collection

Ranger specialises in providing support to independent record dealers and in particular the collection of record chart data. The UK is virtually unique in the music world in including independent retailer sales data, collected by scanning systems, in the official record charts. Ranger has facilitated this process for the industry since 1993 by providing data capture equipment, software and data polling systems.

Retailers use either the new Phoenix real time scanner or modern Epos equipment to capture the barcodes of music items as they are sold. Along with the barcodes, the equipment also captures the time and date of each sale. Selling prices are not presently reported in the UK system, although consideration is being given to this for the future.

Sales data is recorded in real time in the Phoenix system or polled overnight from EPOS systems using automatic ‘dialler’ systems provided by Ranger. The sales data is passed automatically to MBI's mainframe systems, which are also fully automatic, for incorporation in the official UK charts which are published by the Official UK Chart Company (formerly CIN).

About 100 separate charts are published each week.

The Official UK Music Catalogue

MBI's chart process involves the identification of each piece sold from it's barcode. To do this, the company maintains a catalogue of UK music which matches barcode to performer, title, format and many other parameters.

The catalogue is built from data feeds provided by more than 400 record companies including all of the 'majors'. This data is compiled in a common format, checked for errors (about 30% of incoming data contains some discrepancy) and built into a database of currently more than 350,000 products.

Music is probably the most dynamic and perishable consumer product, with a constant stream of new releases, changes and deletions occurring all through the year. These catalogue changes are computed automatically and amount to, on average, 5000 items every week.

Since the mid-1990's, Ranger have acted as MBI's sub-contractor for distribution of the catalogue to independent retailers and wholesalers. Dedicated computers, known as 'Epos dialers', acquire daily updates from MBI's system and direct them to end users via overnight data connections. Ranger provide and maintain all of the equipment needed for this complex and diverse operation, which now directs the catalogue to overseas users as well as those in the UK.

This system has been so successful that at the end of 2000, the available number range for new products in the catalogue threatened to run out (the original design had been for a 4 year life span) and the system was redesigned with capacity for, theoretically, a further 100 years!