Maybe the concept of an album to the general public is now going the way of BlockBuster?

 

I don't know about that but I'd say it's much harder these days to hide behind 3 good songs and a load of filler. With streaming people can choose to delete, skip or ignore album tracks completely if they aren't up to par. Which is why Greatest Hits clog up the album chart week after week these days as they tend to by definition be all killer no filler.

 

Problem is different countries have different streaming rules, so whilst the over long tracklists work for the US it tends to not work in the UK because it's only best 12 tracks used and top 2 down weighted.

Maybe the concept of an album to the general public is now going the way of BlockBuster?

 

I don't think so, there's always been singles artists and album artists.

 

A lot of people would have only bought singles - or just not bought music - even in the vinyl days.

 

 

Edited November 21, 20213 yr by chartfridays

was reading now that apparently as asked by Adele, you now cannot listen to albums on shuffle anymore on Spotify

 

has anyone tried?

I guess if you appreciate the album for the piece of art it is and the story it tells, you’ll like it a lot more. I think people were expecting Adele to just put 12 pop ballads on the album purely to enhance sales, but I’m glad she had artistic integrity and went through with her artistic vision. She obviously didn’t have commercial expectations at the forefront of her mind when making this album.

Adele's least streamed track was on 234K, so I think we could extrapolate the album had at least 234,000 full listens

thats pure listens without playlist shennanigans

but when you convert it, that's not even 4K sales

clearly the ratio is not enough and the OCC should do something about it

I really think they should exclude playlists counts from album streams but then count the proper album streams at a higher ratio

234,000 streams means a lot of people have not bought the physical and is streaming it, but giving it 4K sales does not compensate that and is not fair imho

 

This! I totally agree and it’s been something I’ve been thinking about the last few weeks. I mean I personally think the charts singles and albums are an absolute mess and have been for a while. With albums though, they could easily change rules to allow for more bigger sales, allowing for all album tracks to count would be a good start, Red certainly would have benefited a lot from this and equals.

easy on me

oh my god

i drink wine

 

sounds like me at the weekend hungover

was reading now that apparently as asked by Adele, you now cannot listen to albums on shuffle anymore on Spotify

 

has anyone tried?

You can, you just have to manually change it to shuffle rather than it being the first option when going onto an album.

was reading now that apparently as asked by Adele, you now cannot listen to albums on shuffle anymore on Spotify

 

has anyone tried?

 

You can, play the first song and then shuffle.

 

She's asked them to change the button at the top from shuffle to play the album, which is what it should have been.

was reading now that apparently as asked by Adele, you now cannot listen to albums on shuffle anymore on Spotify

 

has anyone tried?

You can still listen to albums on shuffle but it's not the default option anymore - it's a great move IMO!

agree too

Adele's least streamed track was on 234K, so I think we could extrapolate the album had at least 234,000 full listens

thats pure listens without playlist shennanigans

but when you convert it, that's not even 4K sales

clearly the ratio is not enough and the OCC should do something about it

I really think they should exclude playlists counts from album streams but then count the proper album streams at a higher ratio

234,000 streams means a lot of people have not bought the physical and is streaming it, but giving it 4K sales does not compensate that and is not fair imho

Totally agree, an album that gets played in full should be counted at a higher ratio than those just getting streams from playlists.

Totally agree, an album that gets played in full should be counted at a higher ratio than those just getting streams from playlists.

I mean it does, because streaming a whole album gets you the full 1/100th or 1/600th (depending on your account status) of a sale, whereas streaming a song from a playlist will only net 1/800th or 1/4800th and only if it's the 3rd-10th biggest song on the album. People hearing "Easy On Me" on a playlist are contributing 0.0000 sales to "30" because that's how it works. It's very rare that albums actually have more than the two biggest songs on playlists at a given time so it becomes pretty negligible on the whole. It might just seem like non-full listens are extremely overweighted if you're not fully grasping the sheer volume to which they outnumber start to finish album listens.

 

Either way though, the 'idealised' version of listening to the album from start to finish is a bit gatekeeper-y for my liking, and you could also argue that someone who has listened to an album from start to finish might not necessarily have their undivided attention. Like a playlist, chucking on an album is an easy way to program yourself an hour of music with little effort, even if you totally zone out from it in lieu of something else you might be doing. But also I'll quote myself about the problems with this idea of supposed 'full album streams' (the topic at the time suggested *only* counting full streams, but the idea of bonus streaming points for it is just shifting the numbers higher so the idea still applies

 

Applying streaming points for full album listens (and only attributed to that particular album) seems solid in theory but I think there are far too many realistic examples of normal listener behaviour that make it fall apart with excessive false negatives.

 

-Say a person is listening to Justin Bieber's new album, they skip the MLK Interlude because 'lol Justin who are you trying to impress' but also a lot of people just generally skip interludes/skits etc (in fact about half of people who listened to this album already have), should that not count in any capacity? Or if they stop listening on track 15 because they already decided last year that "lonely" is dire and don't need to hear it again, should the entire 40/45 minute Justin experience be scrapped because they didn't adhere to Justin's full creative vision for the album experience?

-Drake puts out "Scorpion" and it's way too long for anyone's good, but it's got the hits buried in it. So I listen to it once and cherry pick to find the "Mob Ties" & "Summer Games" wheat from the "Ratchet Happy Birthday" and "I'm Upset" chaff. I put my new condensed 13 track version onto a new playlist where I put saved albums/tracks because it's much easier than saving them all individually (A lot of people I know do this). If I listen to this abridged version from start to finish should that count for nothing? Or if I should put it on shuffle, should it only count in the miracle dice roll that every track pops up in the same 1 day session?

-Say I'm listening to Lil Uzi Vert's "Eternal Atake" late one night as I'm doomscrolling twitter. It just so happens that this 1 hour listen ticks over the day cut off that Spotify uses when they compartmentalise their data into day by day playcounts and send it to the OCC, should my listen not count because the whole thing never turned up together on a single day? Should it instead just count in full on the 2nd day when the listen is finished? What if that 2nd day is Thursday and so an album that was primarily listened to on a Wednesday doesn't even count because of the OCC's big brain Fallout 76 energy that prioritises publishing a chart ASAP rather than accurately? What if upon reaching track 16 (of 18) I get this unexplainable urge to listen to "XO TOUR Llif3" which has just for some reason entered my mind, I do that and then finish listening to the album. Does it not count as an album stream in any capacity because it was interrupted? Or is this particular instance okay because it's still the same artist?

-When My Bloody Valentine's artist page top 10 inevitably gets inundated mostly with "Loveless" tracks in the coming days, would listening through that track list not count because I didn't actually queue up an album, even if it's effectively just a different idealised version of a similar experience of listening to "Loveless" in full?

 

In general, quick fix ideas to invigorate the chart practically always come with unintended/realised side-effects. Plenty of examples just from the last 4 years of the official chart.

I don't think I have come even remotely close to listening to any album enough to be counted as a "sale" on Spotify. As the physical market heads towards rigor mortis, they should really change the album sales formula imo.

I don't think I have come even remotely close to listening to any album enough to be counted as a "sale" on Spotify. As the physical market heads towards rigor mortis, they should really change the album sales formula imo.

 

U dont really need to listen to the whole album, but u contribute as per what/ how many songs u listen to

I mean it does, because streaming a whole album gets you the full 1/100th or 1/600th (depending on your account status) of a sale, whereas streaming a song from a playlist will only net 1/800th or 1/4800th and only if it's the 3rd-10th biggest song on the album.

There's no paid/free split for albums - each of the 3rd-12th most streamed tracks are counted at 1000:1. Therefore if you stream a whole album of 12 tracks or more, you provide it with 1/100th of a sale, plus a share of up to 1/500th more for keeping the top 2 tracks, which are downweighted to the average of the next 10, in the top 2.

 

I don't think I have come even remotely close to listening to any album enough to be counted as a "sale" on Spotify. As the physical market heads towards rigor mortis, they should really change the album sales formula imo.

I'm not sure what that would achieve other than making album sales look bigger than they are now, and adding even more weight to streams at the expense of the pure sales that are left.

Songs performed on an Audience with Adele to watch out for:

 

Hometown Glory

Hello

Send my love (To My New Lover)

Easy on me

I drink wine

Rolling In The Deep

Hold on

Set Fire To The Rain

Someone like you

Love is a Game

 

There's no paid/free split for albums - each of the 3rd-12th most streamed tracks are counted at 1000:1. Therefore if you stream a whole album of 12 tracks or more, you provide it with 1/100th of a sale, plus a share of up to 1/500th more for keeping the top 2 tracks, which are downweighted to the average of the next 10, in the top 2.

Is there any documentation on this? Not necessarily doubting but it's the first I've heard of it, what with chart companies being notoriously coy about explaining their methodologies properly and making it easy to find.

Is there any documentation on this? Not necessarily doubting but it's the first I've heard of it, what with chart companies being notoriously coy about explaining their methodologies properly and making it easy to find.

https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/u...rst-time__8012/

https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/u...rst-time__8012/

Fair. It doesn't really specify that they combine both rates for the album chart so I can't feel certain on it (it seems pretty out of character/illogical to change it solely for that purpose?).

 

Either way though the actual numbers aren't really the point of my post from before, but cheers for the clarification.

Fair. It doesn't really specify that they combine both rates for the album chart so I can't feel certain on it (it seems pretty out of character/illogical to change it solely for that purpose?).

 

Either way though the actual numbers aren't really the point of my post from before, but cheers for the clarification.

The change to introduce different paid/free ratios to the singles chart came a few years later - in July 2018, when video streams were counted for the first time. I think an OCC article at the time specifically stated that streams for the album chart weren't affected. But yes, it's by the by in terms of your overall point.