Overall, it has far more fresh talent, movement and a diversity of genres that the singles chart does. It’s not perfect but to me it’s operating relatively well with the 2 songs downgraded rule and the weighting of sales. It feels like it actually measures who cares about an artist or album.

The one thing I think needs changing is the hits compilations. They can’t forever chart it’s wrong - a stream should count to whatever album it’s played from. If you choose Mr. brightside from Hot Fuss, that album gets the stream, if you choose it from Direct Hits, that album does.

It’s the singles chart that’s broken! We decided not to include airplay like the US does, but hitting play on a playlist chosen by a big company now determines what charts - it’s no different to listening to radio. Playlists should be downweighted to the 600:1 ratio regardless of if the play is premium or free.

Yeah I agree with this, they want to keep the excitement of high sales weeks I guess, but sales are much more spread out. The days of 100k debuts are gone but when these songs rack up 40k/30k/20k per week for a year they “sell” much more in the long run. Bit late now though now that we have so many 2x 3x 4x platinum songs

All I’d do for the singles chart is change the ‘cut off’ point for a stream to count from 30 seconds to 1 minute.

For albums, only album tracks would count in terms of streaming (there wouldn’t need to be any downweighting) This would pretty much wipe out old Greatest Hits albums from the chart unless they got good pure sales. If albums as a whole are being listened to than the album tracks rather than the singles is a better representation of its popularity imo

the problem you have there is that a song's streams are tracked by the OCC (I think) by ISRCs and most of the time when in a compilation and album both, they have the same ISRC, so I assume that would bring up problems with tracking I think streaming counting towards greatest hits is a flaw, it's an albums chart, for actual albums rather than compilations... a stream should count to the album that song is from originally in my opinion, and greatest hits basically only charting on pure sales... It's a tough one though

Perhaps this explains the OCC's decision to count to both the album + the GH then, seeing as there's no real way of distinguishing?

the solution is very easy, count only proper album streams aka when someone goes and streams songs from the album
and exclude playlists counts, so when you listen from a playlist like Hot hits, a stream from a playlist shouldn't count for the album charts.

I agree with the suggestion that songs should count only to the album they're streamed from - so a stream of Whitney's I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) via the Whitney album would only count to the Whitney album in the chart, and not to The Ultimate Collection as well. Playlists seem quite unavoidable though - and where is the line drawn? What if you stream 5 songs from Mabel's album via a playlist? That's a pretty significant number and feels worthy of counting in some small capacity to the chart.

. Sometimes I look up songs and artists on playlists that I know they're on because Spotify's search function is so painfully slow that it's honestly easier. No matter the source, a stream is a stream.

Similarly, for a song I agree a stream is a stream, but for an album I don’t, an album has always be a specific and explicit way of consuming music as opposed to radio and singles and (now to me) playlists. I agree the user made playlist is a difficult one to get right, but I can’t imagine one album only specific playlists are that bigger thing which is the only grey area.

You just know labels will try and flout this rule with songs getting prominent exposure (via TikTok or playlists) yet never promoted to official singles - it blurs the lines and I think it would ultimately end up being messy. Singles are part of albums too anyway and I think they have to be counted in some capacity (especially when being a single doesn't necessarily dictate the most popular songs from an album these days - look at Wishing Well being Juice WRLD's highest song in the chart currently, ahead of singles Come & Go and Smile!)