I think we're avoiding the real problem here which is that studio albums just aren't selling in any real quantity these days. If you go back 10 years then "Gold" for example was probably selling roughly the same amount (in entirely physical quantities obviously) but that was only enough for say top 60 and "popular" albums were shifting significantly more weekly. We can go on excluding this and excluding that until the chart "looks" like it used to back in the day but we're only disguising the real issue which is that the GP only want to invest in tracks rather than albums (fans aside).

 

It's sad because I used to love the "4 singles from an album then we move onto the next era" nature of the album charts but I just think as a format it is now rather a niche interest.

But T Boy, the GHs are not in top 8 this week so it's hardly a case of inflating the sales on the top of the chart. In fact, only The Weeknd's GH has gone top 3 as a new release in years.

 

I didn’t say it was for the top of the chart.

And big new albums debut in top 5 so the GHs are not really problem there. What Gezza said is true though, the regular albums just don't get enough purchases to keep them afloat apart from the Xmas season.

But why don’t they get enough purchases? Are you saying that they’re just not good enough and it’s all fine?

Yeah it's kind of a byproduct of an aging streaming demographic (which itself, is being late-adopted by older fans removing themselves from the 'sales market'). For years I've noticed a gradual shift towards more and more old tracks in the Spotify (and iTunes, funnily enough) charts which has been accelerated drastically by COVID-19. More and more people are probably just content with the music they know now, since discovering new music can be an ordeal (esp. if you're cynical to new sounds), maybe only occasionally warming up to a song once it's been casually absorbed through passive listening. Even if you *do* keep putting new stuff in your personal playlist, most people don't delete old stuff so the only way they're going to shift out is if the playlists get bigger and it takes longer for the song to get shuffled into play. BUT EVEN THAT can only do so much because the bigger it gets, the more needs to be added to diminish it. Adding 1 song to a 10 song playlist reduces a song's chance of being shuffled first from 10% to 9.09% (a relative 9.1% drop), but adding 1 song to a 1000 song playlist reduces it from 0.1% to 0.0999% (a relative 0.1% drop). Saving music to playlists is passively inducing this staleness.

Edited June 5, 20214 yr by Dircadirca

How many units that Lil Tjay album 'sold' last week?

909! 908 streaming, 1 download.

 

What a couple of you have touched on re: the current ways of the album chart is absolutely true. It's probably wishful thinking for it to ever return to working in the same way it did in the prominently physical/download days, even if there was some form of added manipulation on the streaming units, and eligibility rules in terms of the age or type of album. There would still be some issues... a lot of new albums will always suffer from the front loaded nature of physicals and an inability to attract a large and consistent streaming presence. It is a shame, not sure what the solution would be though.

 

It's interesting because if you look at charts from say 15 years ago, there were certain albums that would be regarded as under-performances or flops, but nevertheless they could manage a few weeks in the chart. I don't think there was such a thing as Top 10 peaking albums that would only spend 2 or 3 weeks in the Top 200, which has sadly become fairly common these days.

 

I think I just want to go back in time tbh :kink:

Wanna know WHO downloaded that album :P

 

I think we're avoiding the real problem here which is that studio albums just aren't selling in any real quantity these days. If you go back 10 years then "Gold" for example was probably selling roughly the same amount (in entirely physical quantities obviously) but that was only enough for say top 60 and "popular" albums were shifting significantly more weekly. We can go on excluding this and excluding that until the chart "looks" like it used to back in the day but we're only disguising the real issue which is that the GP only want to invest in tracks rather than albums (fans aside).

 

It's sad because I used to love the "4 singles from an album then we move onto the next era" nature of the album charts but I just think as a format it is now rather a niche interest.

 

I agree, I sadly think albums have peaked as an art form and I don't know what they can do to really change that sans cut out albums over a certain number of weeks old to reflect new releases, but I have to wonder how much more longer it will make them money! I guess cos there's so many artists and songs out there instantly available, it can be hard to focus on just one and playlists usually favour singles more than anything.

 

I guess they'll probably just leave the chart as it is and it will gradually fade from view until it's silently dissolved. I hope I'm wrong, but outside of certain fanbases, it does feel like the art form is dying a bit :(

UK sales chart here : https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/albums-sales-chart/

 

Most modern albums from this week chart spent less than 10 weeks in top 100 and many old albums don't want to die even without streaming.

 

29. Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

48. Queen - Greatest Hits

52. Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon

59. Bob Marley and the Wailers - Legend

61. Oasis - What's The Story Morning Glory

67. Beatles - Abbey Road

69. Amy Winehouse - Back To Black

74. Nirvana - Nevermind

76. ABBA - Gold Greatest Hits (this album was in top 40 on the previous week)

 

 

 

 

 

How would a greatest hits album be defined for the purposes of a separate chart? An album may have a mixture of new material and old hits, what if some of the old hits had been re-recorded for instance?

 

And what status does "previously unreleased" material have?

When new albums are struggling to get high peaks, the occ might do something like they did the singles. Until then, I don’t think they care. Could definitely do with a shake up though.

I agree, and most big albums will do great in streaming on week 1 (look at Wolf Alice having lots of songs on Spotify chart for instance). The issue is 2nd week and then forward.

I think also the preview button on i-Tunes and even spotify itself where it allows you to listen to tracks and decide if you want to commit or not has damaged the product, so unless it all grabs you on 1 listen then people aren't likely to invest in a whole bunch of tracks from the off or buy the album. I can't tell you how many albums I used to buy back in the 90s/ early 00s for 1 or 2 songs- I would never do that now, indeed if I want to hear anything then I'd go to youtube probably now so again these are all much cheaper options than paying for an album. I buy a few for relatives at Christmas who might play them in their cars as an alternative to radio (and if they aren't tech savvy) but other than that it would never occur to me to buy an album these days.

 

The genie is out of the bottle now but the only way you could "replicate" the album charts of the 80s/90s/early 00s would be to just make "singles" available to stream so if people wanted to invest in a whole album then they would have to purchase (either physically or digitally) the album as a whole to get access to the other tracks. Then you're back to the days of illegal copies and websites etc and now that folk are used to everything being available it would never work anyway so for me the album is practically gone. Artists would be wise to just release "tracks" then accumulate enough sizeable hits to basically generate a GH album as their first album- that MAY work with the more casual buyer and help sales?

 

Artists would be wise to just release "tracks" then accumulate enough sizeable hits to basically generate a GH album as their first album- that MAY work with the more casual buyer and help sales?

 

aka Jax Jones, Mabel and Becky Hill

 

It 'works' in as much as it does create 'albums' that have long chart runs but that's pretty much the most inauthentic part of the entire album chart lol x

I think also the preview button on i-Tunes and even spotify itself where it allows you to listen to tracks and decide if you want to commit or not has damaged the product, so unless it all grabs you on 1 listen then people aren't likely to invest in a whole bunch of tracks from the off or buy the album. I can't tell you how many albums I used to buy back in the 90s/ early 00s for 1 or 2 songs- I would never do that now, indeed if I want to hear anything then I'd go to youtube probably now so again these are all much cheaper options than paying for an album. I buy a few for relatives at Christmas who might play them in their cars as an alternative to radio (and if they aren't tech savvy) but other than that it would never occur to me to buy an album these days.

 

The genie is out of the bottle now but the only way you could "replicate" the album charts of the 80s/90s/early 00s would be to just make "singles" available to stream so if people wanted to invest in a whole album then they would have to purchase (either physically or digitally) the album as a whole to get access to the other tracks. Then you're back to the days of illegal copies and websites etc and now that folk are used to everything being available it would never work anyway so for me the album is practically gone. Artists would be wise to just release "tracks" then accumulate enough sizeable hits to basically generate a GH album as their first album- that MAY work with the more casual buyer and help sales?

It can work the other way though, buying a dodgy album on expectation without actually hearing it can create buyer's remorse, and that in and of itself makes one not want to repeat it. You've probably got a lot of cautious buyers who don't want to act on impulse and instead wait to see if an album is still as desirable as it was on first instinct. Only to inevitably forget about it because we're always moving on to the next thing to look at, I'm extremely subposting myself as I write this. That's also made worse by the industry's own fault. We all know at this point that just about everything gets discounted eventually, and often it'll happen sharply mid-week in the chase of a chart position. By all means it may work but they're really putting a finger up to any early buyers, who might be a bit miffed about the whole thing, and push themselves into that later buying bracket until there aren't sufficient early birds to warrant the chart vault attempt. A lot of indie game devs put up opening weekend discounts which is a heck of a lot better than the opposite.

 

But then in general a lot of big album sales in their time were generated on exclusivity, buying it may well be the only way to hear the deep cuts, or for that matter the star attractions (especially when CD Singles were withheld to purposely enact this) on your own terms. Having close to the entire history of popular music a few keystrokes & clicks away for free or a pittance, it's a wonder that anyone who isn't a particular artist's stan (unrelated note: check out the new Wolf Alice album if you get the chance, it's tops) buys music at all.

Is this something we see in other charts, such as the Billboard (which publishes 200 places on their chart). Or is it unique to the uk's chart rules?

 

Is there any part of the world where physical music sales are still rising?

Billboard's rules are arguably even worse than OCC's as they don't have the rule where the top 2 tracks of an album have down weighted streams. However there doesn't seem to be quite so many greatest hits sets in their top 100.

US chart rewards albums having more songs, which is why the system is inflated towards long rap albums. Morgan Wallen plays the game with his 32-track album and pop stars with the deluxes (which is why Dua Lipa suddenly climbed so high earlier this year and has stayed there). Not sure which system is better, both have their flaws. US favours new albums with hits and lots of tracks, UK old albums and collections.

Edited June 7, 20214 yr by Sour Candy

but sure the UK has so many GHs cos of the idiotic chart rule that if you stream Elton John-Sacrifice from his Sleeping with eh Past album, you also give a stream to the GH Diamonds even if you're never ever even searched for that GH album, seriously, what's the logic in that :D

 

sure no other country has so many GHs cos no one else has such a bizarre and arbitrary and nonsensical rule :D

sure no other country has so many GHs cos no one else has such a bizarre and arbitrary and nonsensical rule :D

Australia has slightly less BECAUSE of bizarre & arbitrary rules, which is to say that they decided all tracks only count to one album, but with no clear goal or vision at all. When they first started doing this, *most* Greatest Hits albums were evacuated from the charts, but the occasional few that escaped this initial scrape (Elton John, Maroon 5, Cold Chisel, INXS, Green Day etc) run rampant. At some point randomly last year, The Killers' Direct Hits collapsed, suggesting that some tracks were re-assigned, but it's anyone's guess what's gone where. There's even a live Coldplay album that charts every week because that seems to be where their catalogue has gone (or at least enough of it, who knows what is and isn't featured??). If you follow the UK Charts you should be grateful that you can at least mostly understand the rules even if you disagree with them. Every week I look at the Australian album chart and it's meaningless unclarified data noise. :lol: