THIS SITE HAS BEEN ARCHIVED AND CLOSED.

Fact: no-one buys music any more apart from luddite parents and pock-marked saddos, so the charts are, to all our intents and purposes anyway, redundant. The true barometer of public taste, surely, lies in the seedy realm of the peer to peer file-sharer.

LA-based BigChampagne Online Media are fond of that idea, regularly measuring consumer trends ‘cross all digital channels, both legal and not so legal; including BitTorrent, Gnutella and eDonkey. I don’t even know what eDonkey is, but it sounds fantastic.

Anyway, the news department at Wired (click) asked BigChampagne to compile a list of the ten most traded songs and artists of 2007, here’s what they came up with – does hope lie in the proles?

Not at all:

Top Ten Tracks
1. Shop Boyz - ‘Party Like A Rock Star’ (pictured)
2. Akon - ‘I Wanna Luv U’
3. Sean Kingston - ‘Beautiful Girls’
4. Mims - ‘This Is Why I'm Hot’
5. Akon - ‘Don't Matter’
6. T-Pain - ‘Bartender’
7. Soulja Boy - ‘Crank Dat Soulja Boy’
8. Justin Timberlake - ‘My Love’
9. DJ Unk - ‘Walk It Out’
10. Jim Jones - ‘We Fly High’

Unsurprisingly perhaps, there was a strong correlation between ring tones and online ‘success’; while anyone expecting to see Radiohead in the lists after the release of In Rainbows is using a bent yardstick, apparently:

"The only area where the Radiohead was possibly the story of the year was complete album downloads," says BigChampagne co-founder and CEO Eric Garland. "They aren't a singles band. Consequently, Radiohead has never done the kind of volume that these big video-driven stars du jour command."

Makes the success of Simon Cowell even more obvious that it was already. Watch and learn, dim youth.