as in playlist listens that Spotify etc create. They have the technology to split the listens if they had the will. Everybody knows it's a passive listening experience just like radio, something in the background while you cook or do homework. That isn't a measurement of "popularity" in any sense any more than listening to the buzzjack song contest tracks is a measurement of popularity (at least initially until one playlists them oneself) it's a measurement of curiosity... :o

 

Yeah, but how do you know whether somebody's listening to playlist because they've looked at all the songs on it, and decided they like them, or whether they've just seen the name of the playlist and think it sounds cool?

What if somebody listens to a Best Of Ed Sheeran or Best Of David Bowie playlist? That's obviously a choice to listen to that specific act, even if not to specific songs.

What somebody compiles a playlist of their favourite songs and I listen to it because I trust their taste? That's no different from when I used to buy singles that were recommended, except of course that it counts 150 times less.

What about the playlist I'm listening to right now, which is the chart this week in 1994? Should that count?

 

...And all of that said, wouldn't cutting out streams from playlists proportionately increase the influence of album streams, which is exactly what everyone seems to be complaining about? I mean I can still see the case for it, it just wouldn't be what people seem to want now.

Edited March 14, 20178 yr by The Hit Parade

re: album tracks popularity not being reflected in the singles chart position: this has historically always been the case. Albums that sold millions of copies had NO album tracks in the charts, and still had hit singles by releasing the singles with a B side. Some acts still release singles with B sides and remixes to boost sales, it's not the end of the world if a popular album track is never actually ever released as a single (The Beatles made a career out of hugely popular singles not on albums and hugely popular album tracks not released as singles, and great B sides bot released anywhere else). This was in every 12 month period. Exceptionally prolific maybe, but the music industry managed for 50 years having the two formats, album and single, and persuading people to buy both. It could easily do the same again if album tracks were excluded from the charts.

 

As I say, if streaming albums counts towards single sales then so should album CD sales count as 1 singles sale per track on the album, the cost is about the same as downloading tracks individually. There is no realistic argument that someone buying a CD album shouldn't get the same treatment as someone not buying an album at all, which is the current ridiculous situation.

 

Then we'd soon see how insane the whole argument is once acts selling 100,000 plus physical albums on first week of release take over the entire top 10 singles......eg Bowie, Adele, RagnBone Man, Taylor Swift.

re: album tracks popularity not being reflected in the singles chart position: this has historically always been the case. Albums that sold millions of copies had NO album tracks in the charts, and still had hit singles by releasing the singles with a B side. Some acts still release singles with B sides and remixes to boost sales, it's not the end of the world if a popular album track is never actually ever released as a single (The Beatles made a career out of hugely popular singles not on albums and hugely popular album tracks not released as singles, and great B sides bot released anywhere else). This was in every 12 month period. Exceptionally prolific maybe, but the music industry managed for 50 years having the two formats, album and single, and persuading people to buy both. It could easily do the same again if album tracks were excluded from the charts.

This is simply because album tracks *couldn't* chart though, there was no way of buying them separately and excluding album tracks from the chart in 2017 will not make people buy the album instead, people will continue to buy/stream songs like Galway Girl because they don't care if it's a single or not, it's just a popular track and that's how the singles chart works these days. If cherry picking and streaming was around during The Beatles' album campaigns, things would be different, but you can't compare because it physically wasn't possible back then. Times have changed and I'd much rather see the chart reflect proper popularity than exclude things on a technical definition. (don't get me wrong, there are flaws in how the chart works atm, but album tracks charting in the first place isn't one from my perspective)

 

I agree with your point in the rest of the post though, the OCC really need to figure out how to differentiate people listening to most or the entirety of an album, and those picking individual songs. That would then lead to a more accurate singles/songs chart.

The idea of a separate 'album tracks chart' s a horrible one. Last week that would have meant many of the songs on the 'albums track chart' sold more and were streamed more than those on the singles chart that were getting an official higher peak.

Hey guys! I'm new here so please be nice :)

 

I've always been a chart and music industry stats lover, and the UK charts have always been the ones I'm most interested in.

 

I've decided to start posting because I really wanna put my 2 cents in the current debate about how streaming influences the charts and what's happening with Ed Sheeran's ultra dominance of the charts at the moment.

 

 

So, first of all, I've always been against the idea of non-single songs being allowed to chart in the singles chart, and that was way before streaming even existed. In the digital download era, seeing album-only songs charting within the singles chart or chart before their official release as singles always made me cringe. But it usually wasn't a big deal.

 

Then streaming emerged, and it has now almost replaced digital downloads completely... While I'm totally for its inclusion on the charts, what's happening with Ed Sheeran's new album right now is just so ridiculous that I felt the need to voice my opinion on what I've always considered as a problem.

 

I'll go straight to the point: I have nothing against Ed Sheeran, but I hate seeing his whole album charting in the Top20. If it had some sort of logic, I guess I'd just have to deal with it. But to me, the situation is totally illogical and has been ever since streaming was officially included in the charts with the wrong rules. I mean, my concern is the double-counting of streams, one stream being counted both in the singles and in the albums chart. The thing is, that has been inflating sales artificially for too long already, and Divide's case has just highlighted how big the mistake can be: officially speaking, Divide sold 79.000 copies through streaming equivalence. Except that most of the streams generating those 79.000 album sales equivalent were also responsible for all of the songs from the album charting in the singles' Top20. Not to mention that those 79.000 sales represent more than 10% of the album's total first week sales... So either those 10%+ sales of Divide or 80-90% of its "non-single" album songs sales are artificial, depending on which point of view you chose... That's a big mistake to me, knowing that this has been happening every week for every album from every artist ever since streaming was included in the albums charts and sales count (and the bigger you are on streaming platforms, the more your official sales figures are artificially inflated due to double-counting). That is ridiculous in itself and shows how the OCC definitely do have to do something so that streaming stops being over-represented in the charts due to rules that were not thought out well enough.

 

I've read this whole topic, plus articles and other stuff, and I've got a few different suggestions to make to solve this problem...

 

1) the OCC could decide to stop counting streaming in the albums chart and only count physical albums or full album downloads as album sales. That would mean Divide would have sold around 595,000 copies instead of around 675,000. In that case, all streams would only could as individual songs sales, and that would make it logical that Ed Sheeran's songs occupied almost the whole Top20 on the week of release. But at least, there wouldn't be double-counting anymore and the figures would be 100% accurate. On the other side, the singles chart would look rather pointless each time a massive album is released, with all the songs from it flooding the singles chart, just like it's happening right now...

 

2) do it the other way around and define strict rules as to what is a single and what is an album song or force labels to differenciate singles and album-only songs. This way, the streams of a song considered as a single would count in the singles chart, while the streams of an album song would only count as part of an album's sales. That's somehow how I read the rule the OCC put in place when they decided that for albums the Top2 songs should have their streams weighted down to the average streams per song on the album. Except that to me this rule should have not only been applied to the Top2 songs but to all the songs promoted as singles. And also, there should have been a similar rule for the singles chart: the streams of a song that are already counted in the albums chart should be deducted for the streams counted for the singles' sales.

 

3) if we take Divide as an example, then it seems right to assume that most of the streams of most of the songs on the album were generated by people listening to the whole album or most of the album. So, the OCC could decide to take an album-oriented approach and consider that the streams of the least popular track on the album represent roughly how many times the album has been listened to as a whole, and count this in the album charts. Then, for all the other songs on the album, the streams above the total streams of the least popular track on the album would be counted in the singles chart. I would even go as far as to suggest that not only the least popular track should be used as a reference to define whole-album streams but maybe also the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even 5th least popular songs. And for all the other songs, their streams which are above those "core albums songs" streams could be counted in the singles chart...

 

4) I would hate that, but they could also put an end to the albums chart and allocate one sale per song when someone buys a physical or digital album. But this week we would have found ourselves with the 16 tracks of Divide selling at least 595,000 copies each :lol: This chart would then become rather pointless and totally boring to watch, IMO...

 

 

To me, option 2 is the best one, as it would preserve both the singles and the albums chart as they've always existed while measuring sales/popularity of official singles and albums more accurately. But option 3 is certainly the most feasable one since it would not require cooperation from the music labels.

 

On a side note, I would also suggest the OCC changes the ratio applied when converting an album's streams into sales. It should be proportional to the number of songs actually present on the album. Because the current rule pushes labels to release albums with more and more songs in order to inflate "streaming sales" artificially. Indeed, if the ratio is "total number of streams / 1000", then it's easy for labels to release albums containing 15+ songs so that there are more streams converted into sales. You can clearly see the pattern already: while albums used to have only like 12 songs on average a few years ago, it's more like 15 or more nowadays. I'd suggest there should be a rule of like 100 (or 150) per song present on an album instead. So that if an album has 18 tracks, it requires 1800 (or 2700) streams of all of the songs on an album to count it as one album sale. And for an album only having 12 songs, it would require 1200 (or 1800) streams. That would make it more fair for every album.

 

Oh and finally, while I do agree that streaming platforms playlists do influence the charts in a bad way, at the moment I don't think it is technically possible to distinguish streams coming from people actively listening to a song from streams coming from passive listening...

 

But in any case, I think we've never been so close to having charts reflecting exactly what's popular among music lovers. In the past, we used to have multiple editions of singles/albums to inflate the sales (the Japanese market is still hugely biased with this today, more than any other market), hardcore fans making multiple purchases of a record to support their favourite artists, marketing strategies to maximize first week sales (chosing the release date carefully, releasing a single long after it's been sent to radios, having huge discounts for singles bought on their first week, etc...) and etc... So the charts have always been a bit biased and manipulated by music labels strategies to some extent. But I honestly think that it's much harder to cheat now with streaming than it used to be with physical records and even digital ones. Plus, when someone listens to a Spotify playlist, they can still skip the songs they don't like can't they? So while some of them might be totally passive and not care, I wanna believe that there are also lots of listeners who still play an active role such as putting their favs on repeat and skipping those they don't like or don't want to listen to most of the time.

 

What do you guys think? What I just explained is pretty technical and I'm not sure I made it easy to understand... Let me know if I'm not clear enough!

Edited March 14, 20178 yr by Mirai

Drake album being released this week :lol:

What I meant by the playlists was, its an attempt to rid the passive listening that is happening, especially the chart playlist. Photograph and especially One Dance are perfect examples as I remember everyone kicking off last year that it was featured on so many playlists helping it stay at no.1 be default. Perhaps only playlist that shouldn't count is the chart playlist as pushing the same songs in the top 40 week in and out doesn't really help, they could just have a chart on the homepage but not have it playable.

 

But that aside, it seems the only way to solve the albums issue is to have system in place to determine if someone is streaming the album or playing them as individual songs. As I don't think scrapping songs that aren't official singles does any good, loads of singles have started off life as a cherry picked song in the past few years its what happens now.

 

Scrapping streaming from the albums chart also is not a good plan as lets face it, album sales are dire they need any boost they can and with streaming i think albums might actually recover slightly in the long run compared to the download era which killed them off in the first place due to cherry picking.

 

 

Drake album being released this week :lol:

Prepare for next week's Top 100 to be nearly 50% Ed/Drake then, especially if the rumoured tracklist (30 songs!) is true :lol:

reminds me of the old song "anything you can do I can do better..."

 

They should have gone head to head to see who's is bigger :lol:

I thought the Drake release was a mixtape...

 

His last mixtape was quite popular though but not compared to Views.

They should have gone head to head to see who's is bigger :lol:

I'm 99% sure Drake is bigger ;)

Hoping this Drake 'playlist' doesn't have much of an effect, seeing as only one of his last 4 songs made the Top 40

IMO, the first thing that needs to happen is to get a definitive answer to "What is a single?"

 

Until that happens, it won't matter about changing the streaming ratio or messing with playlists. Either every individual song/track is eligible for the Singles chart or the definition has to be reworked to restrict it to conform with what is thought of as a "single".

Hoping this Drake 'playlist' doesn't have much of an effect, seeing as only one of his last 4 songs made the Top 40

 

I can't see it having that huge an effect, Sneakin' didn't trouble the top 40 upon release and Two Birds, One Stone missed the top 100 entirely, so surely we won't see more than a few songs at most from this "playlist" entering the top 40.

I reckon he'll have 5 top 40 entries at max, probably a few in the low end of the top 40 and the biggest collab maybe low top 10.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-ar...rt&ns_fee=0

 

 

I go for option 5 :lol:

I don't think the Drake' "playlist" will make much of a top 40 impact, but lots of tracks will appear between 41-100.

The OCC are stubborn fellows. They do what they want regardless of logic. The solution to this problem is of course (1) have an album tracks chart, and (2) have a singles chart. That's the best solution, it's a compromise, and it gives everyone in both camps what they want.

 

Never forget that the OCC declared Record Retailer as the so-called "official" chart of the 60s, decades after the fact. It never was "official", there was no "official" chart prior to Feb 1969, and it was the least accurate, least followed, had the highest low chart position volatility, and it sampled the fewest number of record shops, compared to the other major charts of the day. Of course the most famous example to prove this point, The Beatles "Please Please Me" in 1963. #1 for 2 weeks on NME, Melody Maker, and Disc, and 3 weeks on the BBC POTP and TOTP average chart. Based on a total of 270 record shops. Meanwhile, Record Retailer sampled a measly 30 record shops, and said Please Please Me peaked at #2. The OCC says #2 is the historical peak. What galled rubbish! And the same thing happened to The Rolling Stones "19th Nervous Breakdown" in 1966. 3 weeks at #1 on NME, Melody Maker, Disc, and the BBC average. But peaked at #2 on Record Retailer, so that's "official". Horse hockey!!

 

Yes friends, the OCC is a bunch of stubborn fellows who defy reason, logic, and truth, burying their heads firmly in the sand...

And you all laughing at the big top 40 now

And you all laughing at the big top 40 now

Oh that is still the worst of the two and always will be