Isnt streaming basically a count of how many times a song is listened to.

 

If you bought a 7 inch or 12 inch, cd or whatever, the number of times it was listened to was unknown, you could listen to it a million times, or once, made no difference, it was counted as one sale and one only, it wasnt an indicator of how many times it was consumed.

I def agree with this, and it's like in todays climate a paid for sale is only counted once regardless of how many times you play it. Also in the physical days not all singles were easily available, for example I live in rural Ireland and getting singles was often hard work and I often missed out as I couldn't get the singles and had to make do with getting my blank tapes and recording songs from the radio, all songs these days are easily accessible. I used to save my money and when I would be brought on a trip to Dublin (which was rare) I would spend all my money picking up singles that I couldn't get if they were still around (i loved the bargain baskets) and in the vinyl single days I often picked them up at 2nd hand markets. It was exciting then when you would get your hands on singles you missed out on and I got a great buzz from it.

agree, comparing physical singles and streams is like comparing apples and oranges

both are fruit but they're not the same :D

 

physical singles got deleted when he follow-up came up so they were never widely available anymore

also parent albums had a big effect, when I think of big singles like Wet Wet Wet - Love is All Around, all those weeks at #1 and all those sales, partly it was cos there was no parent album detracting sales...

'Sing' seems relatively forgotten these days and that's held up as being one of his best (for me at least anyway)

I'll never forget 'Sing' as it was ACTUAL Ed Sheeran's first EVER No.1 unbelievably! :D

I'll never forget 'Sing' as it was ACTUAL Ed Sheeran's first EVER No.1 unbelievably! :D

Ha! Jameela's chart show legacy lives on *.* :jameela:

 

Isnt streaming basically a count of how many times a song is listened to.

 

If you bought a 7 inch or 12 inch, cd or whatever, the number of times it was listened to was unknown, you could listen to it a million times, or once, made no difference, it was counted as one sale and one only, it wasnt an indicator of how many times it was consumed.

 

That's it exactly. Streaming and sales are such fundamentally different concepts that it is pretty much impossible to compare them though for chart purposes where the two co-exist some kind of relationship between them has to be made by necessity.

 

When I first started buying singles in the mid-80s I would have considered it utterly absurd for me to have told Gallup how many times I had listened to Dead or Alive's 'You Spin me Round like a Record' and this to have counted towards the chart but that is essentially what streaming is. I think you could also argue that streamimg is a better way of assessing 'popularity' than sales as you could listen to it just once or every day for a month, surely the latter makes it more 'popular'?