It's the new new Top 40

Every time someone takes it into their heads to muck about with the Top 40, it's hailed as the "biggest revamp in chart history", although what they really mean is "once again, the chart is fading into pointless obscurity and it's hoped mucking about with the rules might give it a couple more years before it finally expires.

The latest idea is to somehow include streams played in the list of the best-selling singles in the UK. Only then, of course, it wouldn't be a list of best-selling singles any more.

Official Charts Company managing director Martin Talbot told BBC News the charts had traditionally counted individual singles bought for permanent ownership.

"The key task that we've been getting to grips with over the past 18 months has been ensuring that post-download, and post-permanent ownership of music, we're also counting how consumers are consuming their music in other ways," he said.

"The charts have always been there as a popularity poll, as a means of identifying what are the hottest records of the moment.

"That's been relatively simple when people have bought stuff to keep forever. But that's going to become increasingly more complicated."

Although the chart seemed quite happy to ignore music played on radios, or taped off the radio, or on television for all these years. Indeed, the chart has never really cared about how well-played stuff has been at all: records which, it's a fair bet, many copies of which have never been played more than once, if at all, happily bubble to the top of the list and sit there. How many copies of Elton John's famous 'Diana Spencer was a bit like Marilyn Monroe, or close enough to save me the need to write a new tune' have even left the case?

And how many streams are listened to out of curiosity rather than an endorsement? Is someone auditioning a track and deciding it's rubbish really a 'vote' towards calling a record 'hot'?

A streaming chart might be interesting, but counting what people listen to is a different endeavour entirely.

In fact, it turns out the idea of adding in streams is only that at the moment:

Mr Talbot said streams would be integrated into the main chart when they become "a very big part of the way people consume music going forward" and fans were buying fewer tracks as a result.

"I'm sure it will come upon us quicker than we might anticipate but none of us really know when it will happen," he said. "I think ultimately it's bound to happen. But that could be five years, it could be 10 years, it could be 20 years."

So, he can't tell when it's going to happen, but he knows it's going to happen earlier than he'd guess it was going to happen? If he knows it's going to happen sooner than he'd predict, shouldn't he adjust his prediction?