Instant live recordings qualify for the chart

In what smacks to us as something of the opening of a glorious loophole through which unscrupulous managers may choose to crawl, recordings made and sold at gigs are to count towards the chart.

The recordings - which people like to pretend are in some way bootlegs, although, of course, they're official - are at first only going to count in single format, as they've only been around years and the chart people don't want to rush into anything. Although who'd buy a live single as they left a gig? If the experience was so terrible you'd only want one song from it, would you really bother?

There's also what seems to be a somewhat unnecessarily complicated download system as well, which involves buying a scratchcard or something that you can use to put in a unique code when you get home. The idea being, you can limit puchases to people who went to the gig.

The idea is to stop proper bootlegging; this seems to assume that you'd only ever want to own a copy of a live gig which you attended, as if people who buy bootleg tapes spend their evenings trying to hear themselves cheering in the audience. The actual outcome would seem to be making illegal bootlegging easier, by providing high-quality CD copies of the gig to be used as a master - unless the music is made available to people who didn't attend as well.

music bootlegs