But if I make my own playlist and play a song from that, why would it count less?

Doesn't the US do something where only "on demand" streams count e.g in a playlist created by a user or listening as part of an album? Surprised we haven't adopted that but I guess it would make it a lot harder for new hits to break the charts

Yeah streaming habits are lazy but if you think about it, people passively streaming a playlist is the modern equivalent of people passively listening to songs on the radio, so it's not that different really. My issue is the way streaming is used to feed the chart, but I just don't think there's any easy solutions to fix that. Maybe we just have to accept that today's charts represent something different to what the charts used to represent and we stop comparing apples with oranges.

 

 

The difference is, people passively listening to the radio did not count towards the charts while this does, and as you said it's not any different to listening to a radio channel.

 

I've given up on the charts tbh find it all ridiculous, I'd be all for streaming if they did not accept playlist streams and only direct from singles / albums on artists page, but the way it is built is fixed and geared towards US artists making the charts much harder to break into and reflective of listening habits rather consumption.

I bet if they did remove “passive” streaming we’d all be shocked at the results, and find that it doesn’t make things any fresher and some old songs do even better.

don't know what you're on about but the US doesn't have such a rule bout playlists, thing like TTH do count for the charts '

3 yers ago playlists like HH dictated the charts

now not anymore it's Tiktok that matters

 

The biggest joke is there is a secret formula used to guesstimate streams at the end of each week as streaming services don’t submit their data.

I still think Passive streaming is the problem and streaming companies won't give up their power willingly. It shows how ludicrous it is every Xmas. Give me the proof people are choosing to stream American crooners in huge numbers previous generations didn't give a shite about for 50 years and I'll show you a truly bizarre group of 12 to 30 year olds getting excited for the music of the 50's and early 60's. Apart from Bing's festive classic, Beach Boys, Brenda lee and Phil Spector's album they meant nothing on UK radio until American-streaming companies decided what we needed to hear. They still don't mean anything judging by Radio 2 and commercial radio, which play a much wider set of old British xmas classics (mostly) where the UK kept the tradition of new xmas songs going strong in the charts. The US always treated them like novelties. The most heard phrase in British Homes in december? "Alexa, play christmas songs." :teresa:

 

Charts used to be fresh because it was based on people getting enthusiastic enough about new music to buy it, and once they had bought it, it's chart life was done regardless if they continued to play 'em at home for the next 3 years. It was exciting. People obsessively playing the same acts and tracks month after month is stagnant and tedious. One track staying at number one for endless months is annoying - I still recall well how public opinion against Wet Wet Wet, Bryan Adams, Whitney & co kicked in after about week 8. Track hanging around the charts for years is not going to make anyone listen to any manipulated chart, no matter what rules they artificially introduce. Personal playlists-only won't fix the problem but it will be more accurate and stop me whingeing, so surely it's worth trying that! :lol:

 

Albums vs singles is the other main problem. Keep saying it cos it's true: an album play is not 15 single plays and vice versa. Album sales should be the number of plays of the least-popular track and these should be taken off the "sales" of the single tracks, and huge numbers of plays for some old or new tracks should not contribute towards sales on albums. That will at least modify the impact of curiosity streams of new albums on the single-track chart, and clear the album chart of hits albums...

The biggest joke is there is a secret formula used to guesstimate streams at the end of each week as streaming services don’t submit their data.

 

Yeah that's absolutely inexcusable in this day and age.

The difference is, people passively listening to the radio did not count towards the charts while this does, and as you said it's not any different to listening to a radio channel.

Not entirely the same, radio doesn't have a skip function. Obviously people can change the station but that kind of specific action isn't captured when calculating audience impressions on the radio.

 

As a matter of fact, the ability to skip songs on streaming playlists does serve as a demonstration that most kinds of quick-fixes wouldn't really satisfy everyone, or might only briefly satiate before descending into a similar equilibrium. Here we have one such function that's always been there, and yet it doesn't solve anyone's preconceptions of what the chart should be like. Much like the chart itself, once you have everyone's collective skips piling together, cancelling each other out, you're going to be left with a final tally that's probably at odds with everyone's individual experience. The OCC could probably announce that they've diminished passive streaming (whatever that means) and I'd sooner expect that people will want it back after seeing what it's done, than I'd imagine people would finally be content with streaming as a chart influence.

 

And hey, some of us will readily take Andy Williams and Perry Como over most other Christmas options.

I still think Passive streaming is the problem and streaming companies won't give up their power willingly.

 

Charts used to be fresh because it was based on people getting enthusiastic enough about new music to buy it, and once they had bought it, it's chart life was done regardless if they continued to play 'em at home for the next 3 years. It was exciting. People obsessively playing the same acts and tracks month after month is stagnant and tedious. One track staying at number one for endless months is annoying - I still recall well how public opinion against Wet Wet Wet, Bryan Adams, Whitney & co kicked in after about week 8. Track hanging around the charts for years is not going to make anyone listen to any manipulated chart, no matter what rules they artificially introduce. Personal playlists-only won't fix the problem but it will be more accurate and stop me whingeing, so surely it's worth trying that! :lol:

I agree with some of your points but I think the problem with the charts being “boring” is streaming full stop, not active vs passive. If you removed all the playlists people would still listen to the same songs for months and years on end; they would just have the small inconvenience of having to make their own playlists. At Christmas you might be right there might be fewer plays for American crooners but people would still seek out Mariah and Wham! And I think it’s important to realise that people stick on the Christmas hits playlist because they have Mariah and Wham! near the top. If they weren’t going to hear the old favourites they’d find a different playlist. So I actually don’t think it would be right to disregard playlist streams entirely.

 

I still think a good solution would be a much lower stream to sales ratio but a lifetime cap. So your first 10 plays of a song contribute 0.1 sales and after 10 plays you’ve contributed your 1 sale and that’s it. No need for ACR then. I reckon the data for that could be made available, but like you say streaming companies might not want to give up power so might claim that data can’t be extracted easily.

I bet if they did remove “passive” streaming we’d all be shocked at the results, and find that it doesn’t make things any fresher and some old songs do even better.

 

I agree with this.

 

Ultimately, the vast majority of people who aren't passionate music fans but still enjoy but don't actively search for new music (which counts for a large chunk of the general public) might have maybe 10 new release songs that they've heard out and about or on the radio that they really love each year and play them ad nauseum. It was the same situation back in the day, except back then your purchase of a single would count once and once only (unless you went back and kept buying it, and why would you?). So where those people might buy 10 CD singles a year and listen to them on repeat, they are now playing the same 10 songs over and over again all year on Spotify, but potentially with other songs in the mix too if they are all on a curated hits playlist.

 

So if you remove passive playlist plays, all you would almost certainly do is make the chart even more stale, as people will just put those 10 songs that they love on their own 10-song playlist and loop it. And they wouldn't be exposed to, say, the other 60 songs they might be hearing if they passively play Hot Hits UK through.

It’s not about passive streaming old songs. It’s the fact new songs that do well stick around a lot longer and there is far fewer of them. To me this is down to pure laziness that streaming creates. When radio and TV had control they continually pushed new stuff every week. Spotify etc their HHUK playlist will be almost identical a month on and people unless something takes off on TikTok rarely add new songs to their rotation. Obviously the majority of people have their classics which is a completely separate issue. So to me the solution is almost impossible because mainly it’s 14-30 demographic that have enough desire to continually update and listen to new things but after that nobody is that bothered. So a song like espresso will stick around forever since when it hits that 30+ demographic and sticks they wont move on for a long time. Unless AI becomes unreal there is no solution you can’t change the psychology of humans.

The Albums charts are far more of a disaster. The fact that literal playlists like The Weeknd's are classed as an album makes zero sense.

Unless AI becomes unreal there is no solution you can’t change the psychology of humans.

 

When AI becomes better its going to be able to generate custom songs for every user based on their listening history. For example if you listen to nothing but mid-10's Taylor Swift songs AI will just be able to generate songs of that style for the rest of your life. At least I think that's the next logical step. I guess there's no way they could be counted for the chart though.

 

But if we think monoculture is dead now, it could get far worse with everybody just having music and films and TV shows and books generated that cater perfectly to their taste that nobody else will experience.

I am pretty sure all Gracie Abrams' singles are composed by AI :P

 

But if I make my own playlist and play a song from that, why would it count less?

I would say this is a different thing all together. YOU have curated that playlist using songs that YOU want to hear.

 

A Spotify/Apple Music playlist has been chosen for you, so you are not actively seeking out those songs to listen to, someone is telling you "this is what we have for you today" in a similar way to the radio. You have the option to turn off, or skip the songs, but you haven't said "I want X Song in this playlist" or "I would like to listen to this selection of songs that I already know I enjoy".

It’s not about passive streaming old songs. It’s the fact new songs that do well stick around a lot longer and there is far fewer of them. To me this is down to pure laziness that streaming creates. When radio and TV had control they continually pushed new stuff every week. Spotify etc their HHUK playlist will be almost identical a month on and people unless something takes off on TikTok rarely add new songs to their rotation. Obviously the majority of people have their classics which is a completely separate issue. So to me the solution is almost impossible because mainly it’s 14-30 demographic that have enough desire to continually update and listen to new things but after that nobody is that bothered. So a song like espresso will stick around forever since when it hits that 30+ demographic and sticks they wont move on for a long time. Unless AI becomes unreal there is no solution you can’t change the psychology of humans.

I feel like the notion of people genuinely sticking the same song on for months on end is another aspect that the chart makes appear to be the case more than it is. What's really going on I think is that these long running songs are continually being discovered every day, and those new listeners are replacing the old ones who moved on. For instance, I'm looking at the Wayback Machine on "BIRDS OF A FEATHER" by Billie Eilish's last.fm page, and 2 months ago on October 6th, it had 1.298 million listeners. Today it's up to 1.437M. Maybe that's a modest increase of 10%, but considering that last.fm's data comes from the kinds of music fans who make accounts to document their listening, it confirms to me that if you could track the average music listener all up, that 10% would get a lot higher, and all of a sudden the song's 6 month stay in the global Spotify top 5 makes more sense.

 

Streaming creates a false illusion of what the 'average' music listener is, someone who is listening to all of the biggest hits with that sort of very slow, gradual drop off, but I can't seem to ever spot this mythical strawman. Even the least music obsessed people I know are always moving onto new things, and listening to so much stuff that's nowhere near the charts.

 

Similarly I don't think the gap between big & small hits is quite as exaggerated, it's just that the charts make it seem as such. In the '90s, you had million selling singles that smashed those numbers out of the gate largely in a few weeks. You also had top 10 hits that immediately left the top 40, and maybe spent a handful more weeks in the top 100. These songs weren't even 10% as popular as the mega-hits, but they got a nice chart position out of it. Now you can be 10% as popular and you won't even see the chart. I think the average music listener has gotten way more diverse in what they're listening to, paradoxically, it makes the chart seem less interesting, but I don't think that means the charts are broken.

I agree with this.

 

Ultimately, the vast majority of people who aren't passionate music fans but still enjoy but don't actively search for new music (which counts for a large chunk of the general public) might have maybe 10 new release songs that they've heard out and about or on the radio that they really love each year and play them ad nauseum. It was the same situation back in the day, except back then your purchase of a single would count once and once only (unless you went back and kept buying it, and why would you?). So where those people might buy 10 CD singles a year and listen to them on repeat, they are now playing the same 10 songs over and over again all year on Spotify, but potentially with other songs in the mix too if they are all on a curated hits playlist.

 

So if you remove passive playlist plays, all you would almost certainly do is make the chart even more stale, as people will just put those 10 songs that they love on their own 10-song playlist and loop it. And they wouldn't be exposed to, say, the other 60 songs they might be hearing if they passively play Hot Hits UK through.

I definitely see where you're coming from here.

 

My ideal scenario would not be to capture how many times a song has been listened to, but to find a way of capturing how many individuals are listening to a song enough. For this reason (and none of us know whether it would even achieve what I believe it would achieve or not), I think the best way to capture that would be a lifetime cap on streams of a song of like 10 streams. 0.1 sale per stream

 

Can it be manipulated? Probably. But it's can only be manipulated in a way that garners a maximum of one sale per person. Most people may not even make one sale of a song through the current ratio, but their contribution to the songs sales continue forever, which - to me - isn't what our singles chart should be reflecting (I think that would be better reflected in the streaming chart and maybe an artists chart or something).

 

Seeing little movement on a chart doesn't make for an entertaining chart show, and songs not getting a chance to shine just fuels the flame of the same 10 big hits being the only ones that get a look in...

 

EDIT: Just seen this has already been covered! I jumped the gun, but essentially I agree with the notion that any recording of streaming without being capped will always end in Mr Brightside charting forever, playlist fuelled or not. 🤣

Edited December 6, 2024Dec 6 by Juranamo

I don't have a solution, but the combination of there being fewer new entries in the Top 40 these days and a handful of modern artists clocking up a large number of Top 40 hits in a short space of time isn't a good one.

 

What I will say though is I don't think the Top 40 has ever been a true reflection of what's popular. When I was at school in the early 90s the most popular band by far amongst my peers at school was Nirvana but they never had a number one. I also remember how sick people were getting of Bryan Adams 16 week chart topper, yet enough people went out and bought the single 16 weeks later to still keep it at number one.

 

The point the article makes about Drakes chart topper is a valid one. I don't think I ever heard it during it's 15 weeks at number one, I did listen to it some time later out of curiosity but immediately forgot how it went. If you were around in 1991 it would be almost impossible not to know the Bryan Adams record.