AIRPLAY ANALYSIS with Alan Jones.

Girls Aloud simultaneously score their fourth sales chart number one and second radio airplay number one with The Promise. While debuting atop the sales chart, the track completes a 37-35-30-6-2-1 airplay chart rise.

Although previous incumbent Jennifer Hudson's Spotlight continues to command more plays than any other song (2,580 last week), its vastly reduced audience of just over 40m condemns it to a 1-5 slump. With just 1,916 plays to its credit from 100 stations, The Promise powers to the summit with an audience of 61.03m - over 10m more than new runner-up Pink's So What.

Some 63% of The Promise's audience came from 21 plays on Radio One and 17 spins on Radio Two but its biggest supporters were The Hits Radio (46 plays) followed by Red Dragon and 95.8 Capital FM (37 apiece).

Girls Aloud were, of course, created on TV, and TV has been much kinder to the group than radio, where their only previous number one was Call The Shots, last December. In fact, although Girls Aloud have racked up 19 Top 10 sales chart hits, they have only six Top 10 hits on the radio airplay chart: The Promise and Call The Shots, ...