Music of the United Kingdom developed in the 1960s into one of the leading forms of popular music in the modern world. By the early 1960s the British had developed a viable national music industry and began to produce adapted forms of American music in Beat music and British blues which would be re-exported to America by bands such as The Beatles, The Animals and Rolling Stones.
A single is a type of music release defined by the British Official Charts Company (OCC) as having no more than four tracks and not lasting longer than 25 minutes. On 31 May 2011, a retrospective record chart was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 that listed the 60 biggest-selling singles in the United Kingdom during the 1960s.