There's always been a problem with Billboard's dance charts, going back 20 years. Primarily due to lack of radio play, their charts rely on reporters without the obvious check ("Why is this song #1 when I've never heard it before?") that hours of national radio play can provide.

Today's Billboard charts are so removed from reality that few people pay attention to them. But because marketers need hype, people have begun to use the lists of top downloads on digital music sites as some kind of replacement.

"Top download" charts have some minor uses, but can hardly tell you anything you don't already know. Terisa Griffin's song "Wonderful" (Soul Heaven) was a smash and that was plainly obvious to anyone with their ear to the ground - we even did an interview with Terisa and Terry Hunter based entirely around the success of that one song, which is something you rarely see with recorded music these days. But then "Wonderful" was at the top of the Traxsource charts for several weeks, not days. That's what's unprecedented in this day and age.

Day after day, my inbox and yours are bursting with mass emails inviting us to give in to peer pressure, be like the cool kids and click on a link to check out yet another "best selling #1 track" (here are the top 4,800 results on Google for the phrase "#1 on Beatport", which should give you an idea of where I'm going with this). I don't mean to pick on anyone, but nine times out of ten, this utterly unknown (and truthfully not very good) "best selling #1 track" is on Beatport. And there's no better way to lose my attention, because Beatport's charts are completely and utterly useless for anything other than hype.

Let's do some math to find out how special a "#1 on Beatport" track really is. Beatport publishes about 20 different "top download" charts (two for each genre: "all releases" and "classics" which are reissues or old releases just released in digital format for the first time). Due to the glut of new material and generally lower sales, the top spot on each chart usually fluctuates every day. That means more than 700 tracks can be considered "best sellers" each year. No person on this planet (except maybe Dustin Hoffman in Rainman) has a list of his or her favorite 700 songs of the year. I live and breathe this stuff and I don't think I could name more than 100 tracks released in a year.

So that's what "#1 on Beatport" means. The quality of the music that makes it into the Top 700 of the Year hardly distinguishes itself, either. In Chicago, a somewhat obscure producer from the 1990s - a handful of releases on some well-known labels, none of which could really be considered classics or especially well-known - has carved out a career for himself as a Beatport entrepreneur. Every time I see this guy, he tells me about his latest hits, pulling out his iPhone to punch up his labels' remarkable chart success. And you know what? I don't know a single person who has bought any of these tracks. They may have hit #1, but they're completely and utterly disposable. These aren't good songs that get worn out through repetitive play (like, for instance, "Change for Me" or "Mirror Dance" or, going back, "Brighter Days" or Paperclip People's "Throw"). Their best-selling status is based on not thousands but a few hundred or even a few dozen purchases. This is why a track can become "#1 on Beatport" without anyone having ever heard it played in a single club a single time.

Would it be possible to compute a "new" dance chart based on online sales aggregated from the various download sites? Maybe a few years down the line, but not now. Sales figures used to be published - bragged about - as a matter of course: everyone knew a record from Lil Louis or Ten City was popular, and the number of units shipped just reinforced what everyone already knew.

Today there's very little to brag about. Many labels and artists appear, well, embarrassed by the modest sales of even a truly popular hit single. Nothing will ever sell as many units as "French Kiss" again - it's apples and oranges to compare a hit song to then and now. It may wind up twenty times or a hundred times as popular, but the sales figures won't reflect it. And until people open up about how many units they're really selling these days and there's some manner of certification for it, there's no hope of creating a meaningful dance music chart based on sales.

And that's why I don't care about your Beatport chart: it tells us nothing, or no more than any other random list of new releases. I don't expect that this will make anyone stop hyping their releases as one of the 700+ "Beatport Best Sellers". It's just useful, from time to time, to do the math and foil the marketers.