A song's popularity in the early 1950s was measured by the sales of its sheet music. It was the idea of Percy Dickins, who died on February 11th aged 80, to supplement this system with figures for weekly record sales - a chart that was to become the Top 20. The listing was published in the New Musical Express (NME), the weekly that he co-founded in 1952.
Percy Dickins correctly predicted that these record-based charts would attract advertising revenue from the burgeoning record industry. His starting point was to telephone 20 or so shops every week, asking for their biggest-selling records. The concepts of payola or chart rigging had not occurred to him - or to anyone else for that matter - but soon the Top 20 charts were serious business. So, too, was the NME, where, over three decades, Percy Dickins embraced a cornucopia of styles, from pop-rock to punk and beyond.
Born in London's East Ham, he left school at 14 to work in advertising. He had a natural musical aptitude, and, concentrating on tenor and alto saxophone - his taste was for the likes of Coleman Hawkins and Zoot Sims - played around the numerous local dance halls to supplement his wages, often with the future jazz writer Benny Green.
He served in the British Merchant Navy during the second World War and later worked briefly as a transatlantic liner steward. During long American stopovers, his temporary jobs included shifts in a canning factory and guiding tourists at Niagara Falls.
By the end of the 1940s, he was working in the advertising department of the Melody Maker, then the required trade paper for professional musicians. But the weekly took itself too seriously, and, with journalist Ray Sonin, he planned a more pop and show business-oriented competitor.
At the time, Beaverbrook Newspapers was publishing its Musical Express as a weekly supplement to the Daily Express. With financial backing from entrepreneur Maurice Kinn, he and Sonin audaciously launched their New Musical Express as a stand-alone title, with Percy Dickins responsible for advertising and production. The success of the NME's sales charts led the Melody Maker to follow suit, using its financial muscle to undermine the struggling NME by licensing its own pop charts to daily newspapers.
The pop idols of the day were crooners like Dickie Valentine, Lita Rosa and Dennis Lotis, but, with a fleetness of foot that still characterises it, the NME recognised the emergence of rock 'n' rollers like Elvis Presley - who was denounced in the Melody Maker - along with other aspirants including Tommy Steele and Billy Fury.
With Percy Dickins's talents as a salesman, the NME was still expanding in the early 1960s, as sanitised pop-rock capitulated to Merseybeat and the R&B of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The paper trebled its print run to cover this phenomenon, though the expansion strained a company that had rarely been profitable even in the 1950s.
By the time Kinn sold out to the International Publishing Corporation in 1965, and Sonin retired, Percy Dickins had come up with another bright idea, the NME poll winners concert. These diverse events became the forerunners of stadium rock and the numerous awards shows that are a dubious hallmark of today's pop music industry.
Percy Dickins counted many of the new breed of managers as friends and confidants; he once advised the dapper Andrew Loog-Oldham to dress down a little if he was to maintain credibility as manager of the Rolling Stones. He was able to get the biggest stars to major venues, often for a pittance. But then, as the Beatles press officer Derek Taylor observed, he was an innocent, and, in a business increasingly overrun by spivs and hucksters, this counted for much.
Nor did he lose his touch for innovation. In the early 1970s, he launched the annual NME awards for record producers and graphic designers whose importance grew to dominate the music industry.
He retired in the 1980s, though throughout that and the previous decade he continued his dance band playing. He also discovered he could make money as a toastmaster. As for the NME, it has outlived Melody Maker - and several other copycat titles - as the sole remaining pop weekly.
Percy Dickens is survived by his wife Sylvia, whom he married in 1946, and sons, Rob and Barry.
Percy Dickins: born 1921; died, February 2002