The most telling detail about the UK’s brand new Official R&B Chart is who shows up twice in its very first edition.
Nigerian superstar Wizkid appears as a featured artist on two separate Top 10 entries in the inaugural ranking, published Monday by the Official Charts Company, which is a pretty striking way to announce yourself on a chart you are not even the lead act on.
Jorja Smith’s “Alive,” which features Wizkid, enters at No. 4 in the first week. The track was produced by P2J and dropped on 2 July as a single from Jorja’s third studio album “What Are The Odds,” giving it a solid few months of streaming momentum heading into this debut chart cycle.
Then at No. 8 sits “Nights In The Sun (N.I.T.S)” from British-Nigerian singer Odeal, also featuring Wizkid.
That one is a different kind of story, a newer and less-established artist getting a significant chart placement in the same week, on the same chart, as one of the UK’s most celebrated R&B voices.
The Official R&B UK Chart ranks current R&B singles by British artists based on combined UK sales and streams, with eligible tracks needing to have been released within the previous 12 months.
The first edition covers the week ending 11 September and went live at 9 a.m. on officialcharts.com, making this a genuinely new piece of infrastructure for British R&B as a genre.
For Wizkid, this is familiar territory in terms of UK chart presence, even if the format is new. He spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Official Singles Chart back in 2016 as a featured artist on Drake’s “One Dance,” so landing in the Top 10 of a specialist chart through two separate collaborations fits a pattern he has been building for nearly a decade.
What makes this week’s double placement interesting is that both tracks come through British artists with very different profiles.
Jorja Smith is an established name with a Mercury Prize to her name and a loyal fanbase that has followed her across three albums.
Odeal is still building, and a No. 8 debut on a nationally recognised chart is the kind of moment that can shift how an artist is perceived by labels, playlist curators, and the wider industry.
From a chart mechanics perspective, the fact that both songs are new entries with just one week of data behind them says something about how well they have been performing on streaming platforms before this chart even existed.
Neither track is a fresh release riding a first-week spike, which means they were already accumulating plays organically.
The launch of a dedicated Official R&B UK Chart has been welcomed by parts of the music industry that felt the genre was underrepresented in mainstream chart conversations.
Whether it changes how R&B is marketed, funded, or promoted in the UK is a longer conversation, but the first edition has already generated genuine talking points just by virtue of who appears in it and how.
Wizkid has not commented publicly on the placements yet, and neither has Odeal’s camp, but the numbers are already doing the talking.
