Orbit touch produces another winner.

For the second year in a row, the number one airptay hit, as determined by Music Control, is a William Orbit creation. Orbit produced and co-authored Madonna's Beautiful Stranger which topped the 1999 rankings and performed an identical dual role on Pure Shores, the All Saints hit which topped the chart for six weeks in February and March and emerged as the easy victor in the 2000 rankings.

As formats between radio stations blurred, it was one of nine records in 2000 to register a higher audience than that with which Madonna triumphed in 1999, achieving both the highest number of plays (64,777) and the largest audience (2.14bn). Pure Shores was on schedule to become the first record to top the airplay and sales rankings since Wet Wet Wet's Love Is All Around in 1994 but lost its sales crown to Bob The Builder's Can We Fix It in the last week of the year.

It was never in danger on the airplay chart, however, finishing a massive 13,262 plays and 355m listeners ahead of runner-up Groovejet (If This Ain't Love) by Spiller. Bob The Builder's single, by the way, was played a mere 939 times, was heard less than 50m times and finished in 675th place for the year.

Pure Shores was a worthy chart champ and one of two records to spend six weeks at number one in 2000, the other being Sonique's It Feels So Good, which ended up as the fifth biggest hit of the year. The All Saints and Sonique hits were among four records which appear in the Top 10 of both the sales and airplay chart for 2000, the others being the previously mentioned Spiller hit, and Robbie Williams' Rock DJ.

Williams was heard on the 2000 airwaves more than any other artist, with 5.35bn audience impressions in the year, a remarkable tally, representing about 100 per person. He seems to have the knack of creating records which have very long radio lives, as evidenced by the presence of no fewer than eight of his singles in the Top 200 for the year (Rock DJ at eight, She's The One at 26, Supreme at 74, Kids (with Kylie Minogue) at 78, Strong at 119, Angels at 129, Millennium at 153 and Let Me Entertain You at 198). Craig David, who was runner-up to Robbie in the audience rankings, was the only artist to have three records in the Top 50 for the year, with 7 Days at 14, Fill Me In at 15 and Walking Away at 33.

Although homegrown talent has consistently outperformed US acts in the singles chart for the past decade, this has not been the case on radio, with US acts taking a bigger slice of the Top 50 radio pie every year from 1996 to 1999. They failed to do so last year, though, with British acts filling 28 positions, American acts 15 and others just seven.

No American record was able to make the Top 10 for the year, with Mary Mary's Shackles at 13 being the most popular cut from the other side of the Atlantic. It was also one of the records which attained a significantly higher final place in the airplay list than on the sales list, where its 2000 rank was 48th. Others which achieved even more disproportionate airplay were Lene Marlin's Sitting Down Here (number 12 on airplay, 49 on sales), Moloko's The Time Is Now (17, 73) and, biggest of all, Gabrielle's What A Woman (19, 144). The Bob The Builder single was the best illustration of the flipside of this coin (records with great sales but poor airplay), other notable examples including the Baha Men's Who Let The Dogs Out (number four on sales, 304 on airplay), the Tweenies' Number One (34, 900) and any number of boy band hits, including all five Westlife singles (1, 23), with almost exactly the same exposure between them as Spiller's Groovejet managed on its own. Westlife's biggest airplay hit -- Fool Again -- is ranked at 89.