In our new technology era a young man who does not have any interest in music would look like a dinosaur. In fact, even our forbears who lived in tribes had their own musical passions. Some of them for sure liked one ritual saying of their shaman, and some of them liked the other one. Of course as the time passed the music changed greatly, a big variety of styles and trends have appeared. And I am taking the liberty of saying that even today it is hard to live without well-known seven notes arranged by a composer’s gift.

Fortunately, my contemporary does not have to listen to everything that appears in a musical market. And it is impossible to do it because life is short and there is too much information. Recall a very famous song:

Thousands of books one can find in the world…
If you read all of them you’ll become old.

We could say something very similar about audios and movies. What can we do then? How can we be in the centre of events and spend less time, less efforts and less means? The answer is very simple. Different charts and hit parades will help you to remain on the float in the music whirl. At present they are in every mass media.

Let’s start our conversation with TV hit parades. To my mind, they are an ideal variant, a dream of every contemporary music lover. Here you do not only get different information about the most popular clips. You have an opportunity to enjoy them as they say here and now. The weakness of such ratings is that it will take you more than an hour to watch them, and a watcher cannot recur to this information at the time convenient for him. However, TV has the strongest effect of presence and nothing will prevent you from enjoying your favourite singers.

Radio charts are the next according to their popularity. It is pleasant that you can affect most of these hit lists using Internet. The main merit of broadcasting is the possibility of listening to favourite compositions while doing some useful things such as tidying up your room.

At last we came to hit parades published on the pages of your favourite magazines. Their advantage is that it is easy to refresh the top tens (20s,30s) of your idols. You can even cut the page out and stick it on the wall where you would often see it.

Unfortunately, it is an incontestable fact that different hit parades do not reflect all music trends. Have you ever seen country and classic songs together in one and the same top?

But on the other hand these ratings help unknown but talented singers to survive and become famous in the show business market. It is tops where we get to know new names and buy their albums then.

In my deep belief a developed personality today must be diverse and like different musical styles and trends. That is why one shouldn’t listen only to music given in various ratings.

And nevertheless charts can help you to make a good home audio collection because there we hear the music most popular with majority of population.

I’d like to note that top tens, tops, hit parades, hit lists, and others have drawn a distinction between mass and elite musical cultures. It is all up to you, my reader, if you will listen to popular music or not.

The ideal variant is to make your top ten according to your own musical preferences. It is very important not to get lost in this mass commercial trumpery just to keep your taste. This is what I want to wish you in conclusion.

Anton Abramov.