24 minutes ago, Dobbo said:

Agreed, it's still completely baffling to me that it seems everyone within the music industry has just accepted that Thursday streaming data isn't possible to accurately disclose for whatever reason and some random algorithm is a perfectly fine alternative. Probably cost many past hits a higher peak.

I honestly don't think it makes that big a difference - streaming data doesn't move that fast so it's rare that Thursdays provide anything notably different. Of course, it has on some occasions, though it's usually for hits that are trending upwards and will climb the following week anyway. The only real issues are when notable days like Halloween or Christmas fall on the Thursday and the significant upward spike is missed, and I doubt the industry or the OCC are that bothered about a load of old songs missing out on their yearly boost or we'd have seen some changes by now!

22 minutes ago, Hadji said:

Sundays were better. Fridays chart is terrible and Sundays had more listeners than Fridays and did I say the whole world? Does the UK count as the whole world. Oh dear oh dear. Looks like it’s you that’s hit a new low for saying the whole world instead of the UK

Let's keep it calm everyone - ultimately, you're welcome to your opinion, but there's a difference between your opinion and saying that something should or has to change when ultimately, there's no good reason for it to do so.

1 hour ago, Bjork said:

The OCC could get accurate streams too, they just need to apply some pressure to spotify, who could get the data if they wanted at 00:00:00:01 on Friday.

The difference with the US is that there is no live show reveal, no broadcast.

Citation needed

Spotify don't even update the numbers on their own platform until the following afternoon.

I mean, I work in bioinformatics, to do any kind of analysis, extract any kind of data you want from anywhere

it literally takes 1 nanosecond. If I run a script that says go to the human genome and grab me all the instances of a "GTGC", it takes 1 second.

Yeah a whole streaming day that essentially doesn’t matter is absurd. But everything seems archaic. If a surprise release happens they can’t even adjust a radio 1 playlist till the next week. It’s like a very rigid amateur thing. Spotify numbers surely work non manually so why would it be so difficult to get the full data by 12 midday but they probably want it done by 8am or something so they can inform people I don’t know but the chart should reflect real numbers not guesses.

3 minutes ago, Bjork said:

I mean, I work in bioinformatics, to do any kind of analysis, extract any kind of data you want from anywhere

it literally takes 1 nanosecond. If I run a script that says go to the human genome and grab me all the instances of a "GTGC", it takes 1 second.

Why don't they do it then?

No clue but I'm sure in 2025 any computation can be done in seconds. sure it doesn't take 1 day.

Tuesday, the chart should be run on a Tuesday no real reason I like Tuesday 😁

On 13/07/2025 at 10:54, Dj Cheeky magpie said:

I stay album chart got worst since streaming add to it use get top 20 run down on Sunday now just top 5.

2015 to 2017 was weird singles chart did start after 5pm wired oh summer had summer mag mix 15 bit into show. Or random album track and think 1st 30 min new music only good idea. New format came in because ed Sheeran album took up all top 20 singles. Uk singles not as bad Irish chart even worst over there still prefer Sunday as end of week new music day should been Monday.

The Irish chart uses the same sales week and rules as the UK and is compiled by the OCC..

On 14/07/2025 at 09:52, 777666jason said:

Tuesday, the chart should be run on a Tuesday no real reason I like Tuesday 😁

Well of course, in a sense, in the UK, Tuesday did used to be the chart reveal day, even when the week ran more conventionally from Sunday to Saturday, during the period when the compilers of the chart weren't able to crunch all their data swiftly enough to have a complete new chart prepared for radio broadcast the first day after the close of the survey week, i.e. Sunday. It wasn't available for many years until Tuesday, which would be when the new chart would first be counted down, three days into the week in which it was current, leaving what we all heard on the more detailed, expanded two-hour Sunday show as a catch-up on the week that had just passed, rather than the one ahead. This didn't resolve until October 1987 when computer compilation was such that a reliable chart was finally able to be made available to Radio 1 by Sunday afternoon in time for their main chart show, rendering the old Tuesday lunchtime slot redundant.

I still wonder how many youngsters pre-Oct '87 knew that the chart they were hearing and likely recording selected songs from on Sundays was in fact a week out of date?! Given I was only four when I began listening concertedly to it I'm sure I couldn't have known; it must only have been sometime after I started primary school a year later and heard some people talking about the Tuesday programme that I cottoned on (even then being a schoolchild I was hardly ever able to hear that show live - some might've bunked off in order to do that but I'd never get away with that as my mum was always home and there'd have been hell to pay - I was lucky to be allowed to purloin the hi-fi for two hours on a Sunday!). It does highlight that a Tuesday is a bit of a crap day for a chart reveal broadcast, especially among those still committed to a school regime, but of course nowadays anyone that bothered can just listen to it at their leisure anytime via catch-up services. So as I observed in my earlier post, the actual day of initial broadcast now matters far less, and to far fewer listeners, than it did in my day.

On 12/07/2025 at 20:04, Hassaan said:

It feels strange now to think that a song would be played on the radio for two months before you could even download it, and that was happening into the 2010s as well.

If anything I'm surprised it took so long to implement the whole "song is released at the same time it's heard".

Yeh especially considering that it was only a thing from 1997 onwards.

Also, the old chart shows in the 80s didn’t play every song either!

5 hours ago, Gambo said:

Well of course, in a sense, in the UK, Tuesday did used to be the chart reveal day, even when the week ran more conventionally from Sunday to Saturday, during the period when the compilers of the chart weren't able to crunch all their data swiftly enough to have a complete new chart prepared for radio broadcast the first day after the close of the survey week, i.e. Sunday. It wasn't available for many years until Tuesday, which would be when the new chart would first be counted down, three days into the week in which it was current, leaving what we all heard on the more detailed, expanded two-hour Sunday show as a catch-up on the week that had just passed, rather than the one ahead. This didn't resolve until October 1987 when computer compilation was such that a reliable chart was finally able to be made available to Radio 1 by Sunday afternoon in time for their main chart show, rendering the old Tuesday lunchtime slot redundant.

I still wonder how many youngsters pre-Oct '87 knew that the chart they were hearing and likely recording selected songs from on Sundays was in fact a week out of date?! Given I was only four when I began listening concertedly to it I'm sure I couldn't have known; it must only have been sometime after I started primary school a year later and heard some people talking about the Tuesday programme that I cottoned on (even then being a schoolchild I was hardly ever able to hear that show live - some might've bunked off in order to do that but I'd never get away with that as my mum was always home and there'd have been hell to pay - I was lucky to be allowed to purloin the hi-fi for two hours on a Sunday!). It does highlight that a Tuesday is a bit of a crap day for a chart reveal broadcast, especially among those still committed to a school regime, but of course nowadays anyone that bothered can just listen to it at their leisure anytime via catch-up services. So as I observed in my earlier post, the actual day of initial broadcast now matters far less, and to far fewer listeners, than it did in my day.

Being pedantic, the chart week for many years was Monday to Saturday as there was no Sunday trading until 1994. The big chart reveal for many people in the pre October 1987 Tuesday chart reveal days wasn't necessarily the new chart on a Tuesday lunchtime or the chart recap on a Tuesday late afternoon but most likely when the next recap happened on the Wednesday breakfast show (supposedly with 10m+ listeners) or on Top Of The Pops on a Thursday (again circa 10m viewers). I think by a Sunday most people were likely aware that the chart was a recap, albeit a longer one, timewise. That said, the Sunday top 40 show was supposed to be the most listened to programme on Radio 1. Possibly because there was nothing else to listen to or watch on a Sunday!

I remember the reason for the switch to a Friday Chart date. At the time it was a popular thing for bands and record companies to get fans to buy up the records, thus ensuring often a number one hit. Releasing on Monday for the Sunday chart would do this. However, if records were released on Friday, with the chart on Sunday, it would mean that sales would be reduced and not enough for the number one spot. The Record Industry feared that record companies would have ignored the Friday date and continue to use the Monday date of release to get the record top by Sunday. So they moved the chart to Friday, so they could still get the full week of sales.

Of course, what happened within a short time of its introduction is that the acts that used this system a lot, vanished, plus the sales pattern changed. Where records could climb to the top slowly.

Yeah of course Robbie, TOTP would've certainly been the sooner reveal for regular viewers than the Top 40 show, by some three days. And it inevitably set stores up for the next few days into the weekend for higher sales, primarily of whichever singles happened to feature on the show that Thursday, so it was very influential for those who actually bought most if not all their singles at that time. However, as a youngster with no real capital of my own so to speak, there was no way I could've persuaded my parents to go out and buy all the songs I liked from the charts - so recording off the Sunday show became the answer as usually the entire track would be played more-or-less (especially if a new entry or climber) and once we got FM stereo the quality of radio recordings really got good. This (and the occasional purchase of hits compilations) became my way of consuming chart singles for two decades! I only seldom had a single bought for me, or later went out and bought it myself - either due to the recording being poor or incomplete or if I really, REALLY liked the song.

I tend to use the term 'Sunday to Saturday week' with the older charts as that was what it was latterly, but yes, until the mid-'90s Monday was indeed the first regular retail day, in alignment with the calendar week, unless of course that fell on a Bank Holiday etc which would mean a later start to the shops opening. So in effect we had a six-day chart survey week. This to my mind made Sunday an even more apt day for chart compilation and eventually its first broadcast, as it was the retail-free 'day off' in between the end of one sales survey period and the start of the next. Hence partly why I still find this split week Friday to Thursday frame rather counter-intuitive, almost regardless of the original reasons why it was enacted, which Graham has enlarged upon above. Given today's streaming and sales patterns, I really don't think it would've mattered if they'd retained the original chart week ending Saturday, but there we are.

One thing I am in agreement with, despite all my soundings in favour of the old system, is that now, ten years in, we should neither seek nor expect things to change back to how they were. One major shift in survey frames every 50 years is enough and for the duration, for all its faults, we should now just sit back and stay consistent to the Friday chart.

On 12/07/2025 at 20:04, Hassaan said:

It feels strange now to think that a song would be played on the radio for two months before you could even download it, and that was happening into the 2010s as well.

If anything I'm surprised it took so long to implement the whole "song is released at the same time it's heard".

It made sense in the sales era though , because you could only buy a track once, and you wanted as many people to do that in the same week as possible in order to chart high.

And they did try it in the download era in 2011 and it didn't work very well because so many tracks were flopping.

It is true that record labels in the UK only really began to give up on the front-loaded, two-month build-ups for key single releases in order to sell as many copies as possible and chart as highly as they could in the second half of the '10s, when it was becoming ever-more evident that online streaming of music was rapidly cannibalising paid-for sales and that consumers were comfortably being hurried along to move away from purchasing and towards renting their songs. The attempt at 'on air, on sale' Ben mentions above in early '11 was commendable, especially to those consumers frequently frustrated by the apparently most protracted delays to anticipated releases occurring in the UK, often coming months after they'd dropped in other countries, but in hindsight it was just a few years too premature. One could say it was ahead of its time, but besides the concept simply reviving the status quo that had existed for four decades prior to the early '90s, it was only really the mass exodus away from buying over to streaming in a short number of years that rendered OA, OS more apt and long-term pre-release promos increasingly irrelevant.

I suppose that what really got up the record companies noses was the fact that when records were released after weeks of airplay, it didn't stop some session musicians bringing out the same track being played by a well known artist as a download. Which lead to these "crap" covers making the charts. The record company had no choice but to release the original earlier than it should have been, to kill off the cover version!

On 06/07/2025 at 12:52, AcerBen said:

The change was more about global album releases coming out the same day of the week, so something coming out on a Friday in some countries wasn't leaked online before it was released on the following Monday/Tuesday in UK/USA.

It didn't mean record companies had to release everything globally at the same time. IIRC we still had some held back single releases, though I think most decided it was time to try "On Air On Sale" again pretty quickly, having abandoned the idea a few years previously.

Yeah, it was the success of Beyoncé’s self titled surprise release in December 2013 that made the industry consider Friday releases.