You can usually judge the health of a country's pop music by the state of its charts. A couple of years ago, the then-managing director of one local major label warehouse offered an excellent summary of the Irish charts at that time. It's the only chart in the world, he said in a radio interview, where you'll get a turkey with the number one single at the same time as there's a bunch of sixtysomething singing monks with the number one album.

How such non-traditional (another word might be "novelty") hits as Dustin the Turkey or the monks from Glenstal Abbey will fare in the future remains to be seen. The Irish charts have entered the digital age and we may never have a Jumbo Breakfast Roll at Number One ever again.

This weekend, the very first Irish singles chart to include digital downloads is published. Chart overseers the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) have decided to add sales from eight high-traffic websites to the existing pool of 400 countrywide brick-and-mortar stores which are used to compile the Irish chart. If you purchased track downloads this week from iTunes or Vodafone, for instance, those sales will now be in the reckoning when the weekly tally is done for the Irish singles chart.

Given that Irma believe online stores currently account for about 14 per cent of all music sold in the country, this new chart make-up can only be a good thing. As the public moves away from buying its music on disc (sales of digital downloads now account for some 50 per cent of the market for singles in Britain), the time is right for the Irish chart to take this trend into account.

While all of this may seem to many onlookers to be a relatively straightforward and even inevitable development, it is a huge step in light of how conservative the Irish industry tends to be. Irma's negotiations and discussions about this change probably rivalled the recent national pay talks in terms of complexities and vested interests.

The new chart means there are plenty of cultural changes ahead for the local industry. For instance, can we expect to see more tailored online promotional campaigns around releases? Will a more sophisticated approach be taken to marketing releases online? How will beleaguered main street music retailers react to this encroachment on their turf? Indeed, how will Richie Kavanagh and his ilk react, if it means the days of tracks with an Irish-only appeal dominating the sharp end of the charts for long periods of time are at an end?

Such Irish smash hits as Aon Focal Eile and Jumbo Breakfast Roll owe their success to distinctly local or even parochial popularity. These tracks do not receive buckets of airplay on the national pop stations. If you compare the Irish sales charts with the Irish radio airplay charts, you'll see these tracks are usually only played by a small number of local stations. Yet, they sell enough to squat in the Top 10 for weeks and even months.

While there may well be a download audience for these tracks (and probably a larger one in time if local, cheap broadband ever becomes a reality), the real winners from the extra 14 per cent chart-eligible sales will be the usual array of big-hitters from Pussycat Dolls to Shakira. Sure, maybe you'll have the odd download phenomenon like Gnarls Barkley's Crazy but, by and large, that extra 14 per cent will really benefit the usual suspects in the short term.

What the new digital chart also shows is that Irma and the local industry are finally coming to terms with the whole issue of downloads. After years of stupid, ignorant and blatantly clueless remarks from various Irish music industry figures about the internet and downloads, common sense has finally prevailed. Home-taping didn't kill music and downloads are unlikely to do so either.