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Excellent article highlighting what a joke the singles chart has become and how utterly incompetent the OCC are:

CHART CRAZINESS

Lisa Verrico

The singles chart was already a joke when Ed Sheeran turned it into a laughing stock. In February, the Suffolk singer had 16 songs in the UK Top 20 — nine of them in the Top 10. Sure, Sheeran is popular, but by that reckoning four out of every five pop fans in Britain had spent seven consecutive days listening almost exclusively to the same artist. Nonsense, obviously.



Sheeran’s domination was due to the success of ÷, his third album. Those 16 hits were simply every song on ÷, clearly the biggest album in the country that week. In the days of downloads — which already feels like a distant era — a handful of those tracks would have shown up in the Top 40. More likely, the album’s two lead singles, Shape of You and Castle on the Hill, would have sat at No 1 and No 2, and ÷ would have hit the headlines for outselling the other Top 40 albums combined.



While downloads predominantly disrupted the albums chart by allowing fans to cherry-pick the hits, streaming has made a mockery of both the singles chart and the Official Charts Company (OCC), the hapless organisation that sets the rules for measuring the success of pop songs. The OCC hasn’t just failed to get to grips with streaming, it has behaved as though it hasn’t a clue how it works. Your gran could have done a better job.



Since 2014, streams of songs have been combined with sales to compile the singles chart. Back then, about 40% of songs were streamed as opposed to purchased, whether as CDs or as downloads. The OCC decided that 100 streams would equal a sale. Everyone who understood streaming pointed out the glaring fact that you can’t compare how many times a track is listened to, often free, to how many people are prepared to put their hands in their pockets and pay for it.



Since then, streaming has snowballed, and that ludicrous discrepancy has corrupted a chart that was already struggling to remain relevant. Now about 90% of songs are streamed; more important, playlists dominate how we listen to music and discover new songs. In short, we usually aren’t even choosing the tracks we listen to. Even if we find a song forgettable, are too busy jogging/cooking/driving to hit the “skip” button or are paying no attention to what’s on in the background, the OCC counts us as a fan.



By the same stroke, if someone loves a song so much they have it on repeat, even while asleep, they count as an army of fans. That’s akin to claiming a CD breaks or a download disappears after 100 plays, and that every fan would rush to buy it multiple times.



Long before Sheeran stole the Top 20, the cock-up was obvious. When Drake’s unexceptional One Dance spent 15 weeks at No 1 in 2016, primarily because it appeared on lots of playlists, the sniggers turned into a sneer. Surely the OCC would have to head back to the drawing board? Er, no. Rather than search for a solution, it rumbled on, fudging its useless rules.



A year ago, it changed the sales/stream ratio from 1:100 to 1:150. But the ratio wasn’t the problem. When Sheeran proved that, it tweaked the rules again, like a child cheating at a board game. Now an artist is permitted only three tracks in the Top 100, and after three weeks of a song’s decline, the ratio should fall to 1:300.



Which would have socked it to Sheeran this year, but wouldn’t have made a jot of difference to Justin Bieber, who spent the summer clogging up the Top 5 with three songs on which he appeared as a featured artist. Under the new rules, had he also released an album, he could still have had six songs in the Top 10.



The solution, dear old OCC, is as obvious and easily definable as the problem — data. Streaming is awash with the stuff, and, used correctly, it could provide accurate stats for a sensible singles chart. Why not discount streams from playlists and only count those from standalone plays or searches? Or count only new, unique listeners to a song each week — one “discovery” per person. Data already does both those jobs.



Oh, OCC, please, just admit you were wrong and ditch the daft ratio. Count a stream saved to a device as a sale 1:1. If somebody is prepared to devote the memory on their mobile to a song they can listen to any time, they adore it. It’s just today’s way of taking the bus to HMV to buy the CD.