14 minutes ago, ChrisJK said:

Everything changes, and the way we listen to music does. So, streaming is real and very much has a place. But playlists have such an impact that it's not so much what's popular with the public but what's popular with the playlist compilers. So (for example) Jade can go Top 10 with one single as it had playlist support, but flop with the next single because it didn't.

I do think that "any song can chart" is annoying. I think it should be a matter of the artist actually officially releasing a single with promotion for it to qualify for the charts. This was avoid the same act having multiple songs Top 20 on release week.

Album chart... A sale is for the least listened to song. So effectively every song has to have been listened to for it to qualify for a sale. Not all in one go or by same person. But every song should get a play by someone to get a sale.

Just ideas. They probably wouldn't work in reality.

Take out streaming sales and you may as well have taken away multiple formats of singles back in the 80s. I can remember buying a 7", 12", picture disc, poster pack, 12" remix of New Beginning by Bucks Fizz back in the day and all those formats counted.

I mean playlists don't really help songs on Spotify as much as they used to but on Apple Music, put a song on Today's Hits, and you'll watch it rise 10 spots suddenly - but that's because AM has still only just reached the amount of users Spotify had by 2018 - which is the time period where Spotify playlists held much more weight to them.

On 01/03/2025 at 13:31, Bleedin Heck said:

As it should be, one listen one sale, ip excluded from there on. that includes vpn ip's.

Why should it? in the past you didnt buy an album or a song that you didnt want. Now a song can be on a playlist that you stream and it gets sales regardless as well as its album. Sales now are fake and lost their interest, its just for fun.

3 hours ago, nikos said:

Why should it? in the past you didnt buy an album or a song that you didnt want. Now a song can be on a playlist that you stream and it gets sales regardless as well as its album. Sales now are fake and lost their interest, its just for fun.

There's a lot of scrutiny you can put on the phrase 'an album or a song that you didn't want'. How many albums purchased were largely unwanted birthday presents? How many of them were begrudging purchases because there was no way to listen to the song you wanted otherwise? Then there's just buyer's remorse*. R.E.M.'s "Monster" is infamous for filling up used CD racks, but there's no subtracting sales and it still gets to boast being a #1 on both sides of the pond, and the 6th best selling album of the year in the UK. We can umm and uhh on the merits of individual streams but I think on the whole, the fact that people can choose to stream songs they like more, means that the charts have never been more accurate. It's like preferential voting vs. first past the post, adding nuance to consumption rather than a binary makes the individual much more personalised.

*We all love to celebrate big debut weeks for albums when they happen, but there's also the undeniable fact that a lot of them are done through months of built up pre-orders, sales from people who assume, but don't know they'll like it. Or sales from people who have no intention of ever spinning the record but want it as an investment property. No one wants to dispute it because it's not in anyone's interest to do so, but when it comes to streaming, everyone wants to push the narrative that it's always the songs they don't like that are rigging the chart because surely no one's intentionally listening to them. On the whole it's probably just a lot of statistical noise that mostly cancels itself out.

I think this is a discussion worth having but I think it's important to start it by acknowledging that even pre-streaming, it's never really been possible to compare different eras of the chart against each other. Changes in dominant format and music industry norms over time mean that records from the 90s don't compare very well against records from the early 00s, or the late 00s, or the mid-10s, etc, even though on paper all of those time periods were all tracking the same thing (music purchases week on week). We all know that everything released in the mid-2000s is wildly undercertified (but with inflated peaks) in comparison to songs released even a few years later, for example.

With that said, I do agree that the transition to the streaming era is the most fundamental change to how the chart works that we've ever had, because the chart is simply tracking something completely different to what it did before. We've gone from measuring music acquisition to music consumption, and we are trying to maintain continuity through that change even though it's arguably impossible. We've moved from a chart which didn't care at all about how often people engaged with a piece of music once they acquired it to one where the intensity of engagement with a song over long durations of time is essentially the only thing that matters. It doesn't really make sense to label these two periods as being comparable.

If I was in the business of strictly trying to use streaming data to recreate the purpose of the music charts of the sales era (because simply going back to tracking sales is not reasonable at this point), I'd be really interested to see what a chart based on first-time unique (on-demand) listeners would look like, if streaming services were able to provide that data on a weekly basis. I would expect it to be noticeably more frontloaded than the download era charts, particularly for artists with strong playlist support, and a first-time curiosity stream is not the same thing as a sale. But it would return the charts to tracking how many new people had engaged with a song in a given week in some way. I will say, I think there's actually a lot of merit to tracking music consumption even if it's a break from historic norm, and I think it would be a mistake to return to a time where people's consumption of music is totally irrelevant to the charts. It feels appropriate to me that a song having enduring appeal should be in some way reflected in its metrics, whether that be in its chart run or its certifications.

More importance should be made for sales when it comes to the chart. A combination is important of course, but it takes a lot more to actually pay money for music especially a specific track.

Does it? Look how quickly I can individually download 25 tracks

I'm not particularly wealthy (disability allowance in Australia, ahaha) and this is more of a once a year splurge, but I digress. It would take an entire month of 24/7 listening (if the 600:1 ratio is still correct, that's 15,000 streams) to match the chart impact of what I did in 6 minutes, without paying for it (if that's even possible really, pretty sure phone/power/internet bills exist). As far as the charts are concerned, sales and paid downloads already are excessively weighted. Their impact is just muted because it reflects a reality of a vast minority partaking in it. And yet, in Australia it still frequently has the final say on what goes to #1 (at least 3 instances in the past year, maybe more). Crazy influence for something that's being outnumbered by a factor of thousands.

I am glad I started this thread, the differing opinions are awesome and well thought out backed with solid evidence. the replies also highlight what we sort of knew I think, it is complicated and the only thing more complicated is the way forward to make the charts still relevant

On 04/03/2025 at 19:08, Dircadirca said:

There's a lot of scrutiny you can put on the phrase 'an album or a song that you didn't want'. How many albums purchased were largely unwanted birthday presents? How many of them were begrudging purchases because there was no way to listen to the song you wanted otherwise? Then there's just buyer's remorse*. R.E.M.'s "Monster" is infamous for filling up used CD racks, but there's no subtracting sales and it still gets to boast being a #1 on both sides of the pond, and the 6th best selling album of the year in the UK. We can umm and uhh on the merits of individual streams but I think on the whole, the fact that people can choose to stream songs they like more, means that the charts have never been more accurate. It's like preferential voting vs. first past the post, adding nuance to consumption rather than a binary makes the individual much more personalised.

*We all love to celebrate big debut weeks for albums when they happen, but there's also the undeniable fact that a lot of them are done through months of built up pre-orders, sales from people who assume, but don't know they'll like it. Or sales from people who have no intention of ever spinning the record but want it as an investment property. No one wants to dispute it because it's not in anyone's interest to do so, but when it comes to streaming, everyone wants to push the narrative that it's always the songs they don't like that are rigging the chart because surely no one's intentionally listening to them. On the whole it's probably just a lot of statistical noise that mostly cancels itself out.

Birthdays? this happens now as well. Listening to songs you dont really like its the norm now with the playlists and they get sales and charts points. As for R.E.M it was still bought, same as steaming a song now and then never listen to it again, willingly at least. Most albyms and singles in the past were bought because people wanted to and not because someone else chose the list. the singles sold back then didnt help the album sales it was all pure sales for singles and for albums, one didnt count towards the other;'s sales and there's no argument to that. its a fact , whether someone likes or not.

On 02/03/2025 at 10:25, -Jay- said:

@T Boy I really like the idea of a Radio 2 hosted sales Top 40 count down! Now I wish it would happen! It would be an interesting alternative to the main chart, and give sales a little more prestige again, rather than them just being a side chart published by OCC. It's not like joe public would have any idea about the low-ish sales either, so I think it would have an engaged audience.

I'm sure it would be a talking point this week that Oasis had re-entered at #1 in that chart, and that there's a new boy band at #3 (with a single that isn't in the Top 100 combined/official chart). I could imagine being able to claim a Top 10 in some respect would be beneficial for a new artist, if they've struggled to make a dent on streaming.

I suppose the OCC don't want to dilute the impact of its main chart airing on Radio 1... but I think them diversifying and catering to different age group audiences would actually be beneficial to increasing interest in charts overall.

Yes i think that's a great idea too and it would give the sales chart more exposure though, maybe encouraging more sales.

Edited March 9Mar 9 by Mark.

The charts still reflect popular consumption within a 7 day period, so of course they’re still real. This is a bit of a fatuous question. They’ll stop being real whenever airplay is taken into account.

1 hour ago, nikos said:

Birthdays? this happens now as well. Listening to songs you dont really like its the norm now with the playlists and they get sales and charts points. As for R.E.M it was still bought, same as steaming a song now and then never listen to it again, willingly at least. Most albyms and singles in the past were bought because people wanted to and not because someone else chose the list. the singles sold back then didnt help the album sales it was all pure sales for singles and for albums, one didnt count towards the other;'s sales and there's no argument to that. its a fact , whether someone likes or not.

Feel like there's an inconsistency in this. Why is it valid that an album can sell hundreds of thousands of copies to people that don't actually like it, but suddenly this happens via streaming and it's a massive problem? To what extent are we talking 'don't really like' though? Is there a threshold for how invested someone should be that's been grossly reshaped given the extent of music consumption nowadays? Are there any artists in particular who we know are generating loads of streams from people who don't like them? I know everyone thinks it's ~insert artist I don't like~ but that just feels like living in denial that people like different music.

As for streams double-counting as album points as well, I feel like this is greatly exaggerated in terms of the UK Chart at least (mostly because all the chart rules are very confusing). Given that the top two tracks on an album literally don't affect the album chart, and anything lower than the 3rd most popular track on an album can't touch the singles chart (well I guess ACR can put a spanner in that..), it's such a small issue in the greater scheme. There are only ever a small handful of albums that ever get to do this, and only briefly usually. I think it's a more pressing issue when the chart's rules have arbitrary limitations that stop songs from charting for no good reason. Like how the UK Charts seemingly won't reset ACR for songs below the top 50 or so, or how the ARIA Charts constantly miss out on chart debuts altogether because every singles chart entry has to be individually nominated (and re-nominated) by a label to get the tick of approval. The argument always feels like emotions get in the way and it's way more of an issue to a lot of people if Taylor Swift has album tracks on the chart, than if say, Drake's "Hotline Bling" totally underperformed in Aotearoa/NZ because it never had streams counting for some reason (one could even argue that it missing #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 because of limited data reporting is a [hard to fix] problem in its own right). Most of the folk (I hate to generalise like this but I swear it's always the same) that make the 'charts are broken' arguments would probably see that statement and think 'good riddance', and that to me reveals that the sanctity of the chart for its implicit purpose of tracking popular music is never the priority in this debate.