It’s been announced that from September the Australian singles & album charts will focus on music from the last 2 years and compilation albums will be moved out of the main album chart.

The UK album chart is currently overrun with Greatest Hits albums and having a rule 2 year rule would finally remove albums which will never leave the UK chart like What’s the Story Morning Glory and Teenage Dream.

Please take note OCC!

Full Article: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-24/aria-charts-changing-singles-albums-top-50-australian-music/105455078

From September, the ARIA Top 50 Singles and Albums charts, as well as the Top 20 Australian Artist Singles and Albums charts, will focus exclusively on music released within the past two years.
 
Under the revisions, perennial hits such as The Killers' unkillable Mr. Brightside, which has spent 157 weeks in the top 50, and Vance Joy's Hottest 100-topping Riptide, a whopping 360 weeks in the Australian top 20, will make room for newer music and move to a new chart called ARIA On Replay.
 
Formerly known as the Catalogue chart, On Replay will also showcase titles that have historically taken up near-permanent residence in the main charts.
 
That includes multiple older Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran records, country stars Luke Combs and Zach Bryan, and classic Fleetwood Mac album Rumours, which has spent 403 weeks in the Top 50 Albums.
 
Greatest hits compilations will also transition away from the main charts: everyone from Eminem (402 weeks) and Elton John (336 weeks) to Maroon 5 (321 weeks), Katy Perry (289 weeks) and The Weeknd (228 weeks).

I'm all for it. It makes the charts boring seeing the same Albums week after week.

Separate chart for albums and a separate chart for compilations/greatest hits collections

I personally think the best option is to count album streams properly rather than kick things out

Give streams points only to the album you're streaming

If you go search for Elton's album Sleeping with the past and you stream Sacrifice, you give one stream to that album, not to Diamonds/GH

and if you stream from HH that doesn't count to the album charts either

only proper album streams

that would favour also indie albums, who are actually streamed well, both in week 1 & in week 2, so we would not have those crazy 1-99 runs either

I'm fine with albums that are old staying in the charts, imo if your album is popular enough to stay high like some of these albums you deserve the spot you get. But these greatest hits albums to me are silly. You get double rewarded for having multiple successful albums, essentially.

Greatest hits and old albums should be allowed but on pure sales only - if Coldplay release a GH or re-issue Parachutes for their 25th anniversary and 30k people spend a tenner on the CD, let it be #1

but the current situation where you get double counting for streams and the album chart being overran by GHs ought to have been changed ages ago

They should have greatest hits and 3 year old+ studio albums on ACR by default, that means their popularity is still reflected but they don't clog up the top 20 and stop newer albums from higher peaks.

Top 20 this week with ACR implented:

1. Yungblud

2. Loyle

3. Haim

4. Benson Boone American Heart

5. Sabrina

6. Aitch

7. Charli

8. Tate

9. Noah Kahan

10. Alex Warren

11. Chappell

12. Billie HMHAS

13. Ed tour collection

14. Olivia Guts

15. Addison

16. Pulp

17. SZA SOS

18. Benson Fireworks

19. Malevolence

20. Sam Fender

A lot fresher! While yes new albums would still have a hard time the sales would be absolutely miserable if greatest hits were removed altogether.

Where I come to loggerheads with most is that I'm not entirely sure what they want out of these kinds of changes. Unironically I think part of why ARIA are doing this is because they've gotten sick of the weekly social media comments about how the top Australian songs are all decades old. Stuff like "Riptide", "Dreams", "Iris" are just scapegoats for this due to their regularity, and this way you get a fluid system that doesn't necessarily allow anything to reach this point because modern hit singles aren't nearly as omnipresent (if "Somedays" was the top Australian song for 7 consecutive months, would anyone notice? Alex Warren's been #1 for 14 weeks going on 15 and no one seems to care here). I find the forced retirement thoroughly uncathartic because I think longevity has become the most valuable measure of success (unless you think "Anxiety" is a bigger hit than "Something In The Orange"), and this just caps everything at roughly the same finish line with no point of difference. Just completely kills the 'how far can it go?' intrigue both on an individual level and for the all-time record.

But the main thing that happens here is that you don't generate a more interesting album chart this way. Less to complain about, but nothing to see either. All those hot shot pure sales debuts are still going to crash out super fast, leaving the only real activity with the stable albums that are there week after week. Aotearoa have had the same set up for a while now (theirs is 1.5 years instead of 2) and so much of it is a bunch of albums that sit around week after week, while the ancient Greatest Hits are just replaced by more recent ones, many of which are only charting because so much space is vacated for them. Just in general I think people crave a version of the charts that resembles those of the past, and no amount of exclusions or rule changes can possibly recreate something that public consumption patterns match at all.

Mind you, I'm glad that ARIA is still including these old songs/albums on a chart. I'll reserve my full judgement until I see what it looks like and how accurate it actually is. With the auditing standards I've been witnessing for the last decade and a half, I have my scepticism.

52 minutes ago, Dircadirca said:

Just in general I think people crave a version of the charts that resembles those of the past, and no amount of exclusions or rule changes can possibly recreate something that public consumption patterns match at all.

There are ways to do it. I've tested one method with about 6 months worth of the UK singles chart, which I think works very well. It definitely resembles the charts of the past with more #1s, loads more top 40 debuts each week, songs rarely lasting more than 15 weeks in the top 10, etc. It resembles public consumption patterns a bit, in the same way that the charts in the physical and download era resembled public consumption patterns to a degree even if they couldn't count every time someone who bought a song listened to it.

I think the charts are artificial enough as they are personally. Streaming is a totally different measurement of consumption from buying music. If they want to keep the idea of the charts alive what they ought to do is introduce a cap, so once an individual user has streamed a song/album enough to give it 1 “sale” then that’s it, nothing after that is counted. But they won’t do that because chart “sales” (whatever that even means nowadays) look bad enough as it is

9 minutes ago, No Sleeep said:

I think the charts are artificial enough as they are personally. Streaming is a totally different measurement of consumption from buying music. If they want to keep the idea of the charts alive what they ought to do is introduce a cap, so once an individual user has streamed a song/album enough to give it 1 “sale” then that’s it, nothing after that is counted. But they won’t do that because chart “sales” (whatever that even means nowadays) look bad enough as it is

I'm not quite sure that's a silver bullet solution, I can't imagine the average person keeping all these older songs in the chart is listening to them at least 70 times (or however many is required?)

I think streaming services need to do their bit to promote newer and fresher music. How exactly we go about getting them to do that I don't know.

Album charts-wise, I think every track should be streamed (not necessarily by the same person) for it to count as a sale. So effectively, the least streamed song on the album.

Why it's the most streamed, I just don't know.

An album is an album, whether it's the first song or the last.

1 hour ago, Jessie Where said:

I'm not quite sure that's a silver bullet solution, I can't imagine the average person keeping all these older songs in the chart is listening to them at least 70 times (or however many is required?)

I'd go far as to say that I think newer songs are far more subject to repeat listens than the oldies. Don't think you get songs like "driver's license" or "Too Sweet" or what have you vaulting to #1 if their streams are capped more harshly.

Maybe they should just accept that these older songs are genuinely as popular as current hits and let them chart

Or they could do what Billboard used to do and have a Comprehensive Chart which allowed old or new albums combined and have a Current Albums Chart which has the newer releases then after a certain amount of time be removed from from Current Albums Chart and just stay on the Comprehensive Albums Chart.

Edited July 3Jul 3 by Jerald

22 minutes ago, Jerald said:

Or they could do what Billboard used to do and have a Comprehensive Chart which allowed old or new albums combined and have a Current Albums Chart which has the newer releases then after a certain amount of time be removed from from Current Albums Chart and just stay on the Comprehensive Albums Chart.

TBH I wouldn’t be against this either, they could publish the actual singles chart as well as the one with all their made up rules applied.

The problem is they won’t do that because anyone who actually cares about the charts would care more about the actual one than the made up one and it would cause a lot of inconsistency/lack of clarity when it came to records

Yes yes yes. My unpopular opinion is that the charts are there for the benefit of the music business and for the promotion of new releases, over and above tracking "popularity". Now we've gone past just counting sales, they should use the streaming data in a cleverer way, even if that means that the rules become complicated.

My personal opinion is that some of the streams on older long running hits might be deleted in order for the songs to be calmly disqualified from the chart listings - a la a single being deleted from production, with no new copies being manufactured.

Yes, it does. The charts are very stale here. It seems like most of the songs from 2025 fall out of the charts much faster than the songs from 2024.

1 hour ago, AcerBen said:

Yes yes yes. My unpopular opinion is that the charts are there for the benefit of the music business and for the promotion of new releases, over and above tracking "popularity". Now we've gone past just counting sales, they should use the streaming data in a cleverer way, even if that means that the rules become complicated.

I was going to come in here and say basically the same thing. People forget that that's what the whole model of the Official Charts was in the first place, as a promotional tool for the music business. Yes, the meaning and significance has changed so that's it more than that down the years, but that's what it has always been at heart.

I may not follow the charts on a weekly basis as closely as I did ten years ago, or even longer ago than that. But this idea that the chart is "overstuffed" with rules is not something exclusive to 2025. It's always been complex. It's always had instances of rules set out by the OCC getting introduced or being breached. Go look at any James Masterton chart columns from the late 90s or early 00s and you'll find them easily enough.