Pink Floyd set fans a Wish You Were Here streaming challenge

Pink Floyd embrace streaming at last – but there’s a twist.

A 38 year-old track will be vying to make an impact in next week’s Official Streaming Chart, after digital refuseniks Pink Floyd entered the world of streaming today.

The Floyd used their Twitter feed last night to announce that classic 1975 track Wish You Were Here had been made available on Spotify for the first time – but that their entire catalogue would be unlocked once it had hit 1 million streams on the service.

Help stream Wish You Were Here 1 million times to unlock Pink Floyd's catalogue on @Spotify: http://t.co/PpNjKAm3AX #floydcountdown

— Pink Floyd (@pinkfloyd) June 13, 2013

Pink Floyd have released 14 studio albums across a 27-year period, but have always held their studio albums back from UK streaming services, with their live album Pulse the only release currently available on Spotify.

To mark the moment, Official Charts has compiled the Official Pink Floyd Download Top 10 – which shows that Wish You Were Here is the most downloaded track of all of the band’s catalogue, with 153,000 downloads to its name, ahead of Comfortably Numb and Another Brick In The Wall Part 2.

The use of a track to unlock the band’s entire catalogue is ironic given that Pink Floyd have always been viewed as an albums act. They have scored only two Official Top 10 singles in their entire history – the 1979 chart-topper Another Brick In The Wall (which was the last Number 1 of the Seventies and is currently the 95th biggest selling single of all time in the UK, with lifetime sales of 1.1m) and 1967’s See Emily Play, which peaked at 6. In total, they have had only 10 chart hits since 1967, the most recent being the Number 68 position achieved by Wish You Were Here in August 2012.

In contrast, their albums have reached the Official Top 10 on 17 occasions, with 1970’s Atom Heart Mother, 1975’s Wish You Were Here, 1983’s The Final Cut, 1994’s The Division Bell and 1996’s Pulse all hitting the Number 1 spot. The classic Dark Side of the Moon, which celebrated its 30th anniversary of release earlier in 2013, never actually made the top spot, despite spending longer on the Official Albums Chart than any of their other albums. It peaked at Number 2.

Official Chart Pink Floyd Download Top 10

© 2013 The Official Charts Company. All rights reserved.