Airplay definitely not the answer. Its ruining the Billboard charts where one song is played over and over again on radio so it stays near the top of the chart solely because of airplay while songs who have more streaming and no radio support suffer.

For example I just might is in the top 10 despite low sales + streaming to tracks below it because airplay counts for 59% of the tracks success there.

Presumably a Christian & Gospel chart has a rule where the song is removed after the 13th week charting on the Friday before being resurrected on the Sunday

In the US changes were made to the hot 100 at the beginning of the year - detailed below

https://www.billboard.com/pro/billboard-charts-add-more-weight-on-demand-streaming-2026/

It doesn’t appear to make much difference. Perhaps differentiating between active and passive playlist listening on streaming services would be more effective?

The way around the mess is to introduce a Retail Sales Chart. This is based on the amount the public pay for music rather than the numbers of copies sold. Some streaming sites charge the user more than other sites per month than others. Some users might only be paying less than £0.001p a stream. For example at the rate the Spotify number 10 record would have only sold a total of £1,557.41p. The OCC know who is streaming the records and what they pay for them. So rather than saying as the do at present, that a certain streaming level equals one sale (sales equivalent stream) they count the price the user pays. Then we have the download and physical sales. So you count the retail price of these. So £0.99p etc.

If the record company makes a physical record that is expensive. Say a £60 7-inch. (overpriced records) then the artist royalty is used for the sales of the record. The threshold being set by agreement between record companies and the chart compilers.

There would be no need to have ACR at all.

I believe advert funded streams should be eliminated, but that is just my personal opinion.

The OCC can't tell the streaming sites to change how they operate. But they can change how the charts are compiled. The other charts the OCC (except the streaming) are full of new entries, but these records don't have the numbers of the sales equivalent streams. However, they are more expensive than streams.

For example 600 records at £3.99p would bring in £2,394.00p. Easily beating the Spotify stream of the number 10 record. But 600 units sold would not put it in the current top 100.

It won't be changed, don't see what they could do, why penalise older songs getting an revival over an Rein Me In rule.

The OCC would just need to tweak the way a song goes to ACR.

Rather than a 3-week consecutive decline in streaming it could be more along the lines of 3 declines in the last 4 weeks. That would prevent a lot of songs dodging ACR by gaining minimally when DLC-2 and then needing 3 more weeks of decline.

The problem is that previously records were purchased and that was it. They could be played 4 million times a day (or never) and it wouldn't affect the charts, but now people don't buy the record, they rent it from the streaming companies each play, and we are measuring every single time they listen to it (or at least up to the player limit per week). The act of consumption is completely different and therefore it is completely wrong to compare prior and new achievements as they are based on completely different things.

This is what the OCC need to change; comparing old records achieved with purchases to those based on listening (streaming).

Edited 9 hours ago9 hr by braindeadpj

All that needs to happen in my view is a tweak of the ACR rules so that increases are always measured against the market, so an increase of 1% in streaming against a market increase of 3% is registered as a decline and not an increase. It's silly for it to matter only for declines and not for increases. Would this have affected Rein Me In? Hard to say but it would've undoubtedly sent some long running ACR-dodgers to ACR sooner, and it's an easy tweak to make the existing rule more fit for purpose.

ACR is just the chart company fiddling the figures. When Facebook told the public to stream a record just to get it to the top, the OCC limited the amount of streams any member of the public can have. So the OCC does the same just to get another record to the top. Ignoring the fact that on Spotify 4 million streams has the number one record, but the record at number two there has 2 million streams, but automatically becomes number one because of ACR. Plus the number one record that has spent 10 weeks at the top suddenly dives to 16 in the chart.