Eric_Blob

The David Guetta remix did so well. The original would have done nothing, especially in 2011.

I think Sabrina Carpenter herself is in trouble tbh. She debuted with 1.5 million first day on Spotify last October with her song The Life of a Showgirl, and went from that to barely scraping the top 40 with Such a Funny Way in the space of like 6 months. I'm worried for her.

If Sam Fender does get close to breaking the record like Drake did, it would probably get negative media coverage and probably prompt a rule change from the OCC for the chart. Which might be a good thing in the long run. Although I reckon the media and the public would probably be a lot friendlier to the concept of Sam Fender breaking the record than they were to Drake (he's British, he's crosses over to adult contemporary like Radio 2 so more of the older generations will actually know who he is, his songs use real instruments, etc).

Yeah, but I mean the remix is/was doing really well, I saw it in the top 200 on Spotify a lot so it's boosting the chart position every week.

I don't like that remix that much but at least its helping a lot for the charts.

Nobody would've believed Baby and Eenie Meenie would've been remembered past 2012 at the time, let alone that they'd re-enter the top 40 and be remembered fondly 15 years later. That was the big narrative about most pop songs at the time, let alone Justin Bieber. "Everybody will forget about this in a couple of years".

I used to follow it every week for a while in the late 00's/early 10's. And it absolutely 100% was calculated from real figures (at least back then). They got the sales data for iTunes directly from Apple, and the airplay data directly from themselves (Global). It was highly predictable, I knew roughly where every song would be charting each week. If the charts were made up it would be impossible to predict and I would have noticed glaring errors and inconsistencies every week. It was a completely harmless (and frankly meaningless) chart. Hundreds of radio stations all over the world do their own charts. Some simply rank their most spinned songs for the week, some go by number of requests from their listeners, some get their listeners to vote, some get their DJs to make their own. Given that some platforms like Spotify give out exact streaming figures, some stations now may even be using Spotify data for their own charts without needing a partnership! BBC have a partnership with the OCC so can air the official chart. Global had a partnership with Apple so they could make the Big Top 40 by combining their own airplay with the iTunes sales figures each week. All that said, I have absolutely NO idea how they are calculating it today. Maybe it truly is just made up now (do they even still have the partnership with Apple?).

Well if it's going to be a fan-driven week 1 peak then yeah that might have been better to attain a higher chart position. But if it's going to be an actual hit song I don't think it will matter very much in the long run. Songs like I'm Good by David Guetta or I Had Some Help by Post Malone just continuously built more and more hype while they were unavailable to stream, rather than the opposite.

New songs can and do stick but they don't normally debut at #1 first week. Like Man I Need, Rein Me In, Where is my Husband, Rain Dance. If you debut at #1 it's normally fanbase-driven.

Yeah. I'm absolutely devastated that a straight white male is doing well in the charts. Glad to see someone else on the same page! It's a difficult time for both of us. Stay strong my friend. 😊

That really surprises me. I would have thought it would have done better the first time round if it got so much airplay (at a time when it actually mattered).

Yeah Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart blew me away the first time I heard it. Un-Thinkable was great too but wasn't released as a single here. This country was obsessed with Empire State of Mind Part II Broken Down. It was the most played song on UK radio in 2010 (and that was with the original also being played a lot too).

It really surprises me how long some songs stay on SCR after getting reset honestly. If you assume a song like Mr. Brightside is stable in streams and randomly fluctuating slightly each week, it would work out as a 50% chance of a decline each week, a 25% chance of 2 consecutive declines each week and a 12.5% chance of 3 consecutive declines each week. So if it did get reset, unless it got super lucky with it's random fluctuations, I think you'd expect it to be back on ACR after around 7-9 weeks?

I reckon unfortunately the media coverage about it's climb to #1 probably Rein Me In a new audience. Because there'd probably have been some people not into modern pop music who heard the news and listened out of interest.

Me too. Every single time I've seen that song title on here the past few weeks my mind immediately jumps to Camila Cabello's song lol. The Bella Kay song looks like it's going to be one of the biggest songs of the year so I hope my brain stops making the association every single time or it might get exhausting after a few months. I actually really liked that Camila song though, it was so catchy and sounded quite 00's too.

I Hate This Part was also released in a significantly higher sales climate than Beep to be fair. Downloads exploded a lot between 2006 and 2009.

He might be on to something though. I've never paid much attention to the Apple Music charts but if they are more UK centric the dance songs would do better there by default because those songs are UK centric anyway (at least from a UK-US perspective). I guess the fair way to test this would be whether the Little Mix solo songs, or Dave's songs, do better on Apple Music than Spotify, which I don't know the answer to.

That crazy Choosin Texas has 5 consecutive weeks at #35!

I don't know really, but if fans of an artist want to get their songs to go viral the best thing to do is crowdfund money amongst yourselves and find people with lots of followers of your target audience (or people who have helped songs go viral in the past) and pay them to use the songs. Some people will make a clip with your song for just a few hundred, but the really big people you might have to pay thousands. But you also have to make sure the song is worth it. The wrong song will struggle to go viral. You want songs which have either been hits before so you already know humans like them if they get to hear them, or songs you are sure have real potential to be big.

If you're counting top 200s then I think Dog Days Are Over was top 200 in 2009 and 2011 also? I really wish they still did top 200s. I understand the OCC want the yearly chart to be the same size as the weekly chart, but we get songs that are big chart hits in the summer or later that miss the year-end chart, plus loads of old songs taking up slots, so I would really like a top 200 back for the year-end charts personally.

I knew someone who worked for a compilation album company, and apparently it was super tedious and lot more complicated than you think, because the record labels would have tons of rules and requirements for each song. Like they'd only allow you to use a song if it was in a certain position on a track list, or only if you DIDN'T use another song, or only if it came before or after a certain song or a type of song, or only if you include a certain number of seconds of a song in your TV adverts, or only if you highlight the song on the album cover. And then it becomes more of a puzzle where you have dozens of requirements and you just have to try and list the songs in an order that doesn't break anyone's rules. Which is usually impossible so you have to call everybody up again and re-negotiate. And every time you move a song to a different position on the track list then now half the other songs are now breaking their requirements so you have to move them too. It sounds more like doing an extremely hard Sudoku, rather than a job where you can simply use your music knowledge and creativity to make a nice tracklist.

Eric Prydz - Call On Me entering the top 40 of the TV chart! Nice to see something modern on there. :) I can't believe I Had Some Help is still so high on radio airplay. #11 last week. Are Radio 2 playing it every day or something?

Maybe in the future the pop stars will make the videos Spotify/Apple Music exclusive the entire week rather than for 2 days. I think that would work better, but it's the first time I've seen someone do this so obviously I get why they wouldn't want to be more radical in case it didn't work as hoped.

This feels so old school having a post-album single actually get a big boost on single release week. But I'm pretty sure Telephone was already top 40 (because radio started playing it) before the video came out? Off the top of my head the only post-album singles that jumped from outside the top 40 to #1 that I can think of are Gettin' Over You, Spectrum and Someone Like You (which technically wasn't a single yet). I think the first one to ever manage it since album tracks were allowed to chart was The Way I Are by Timbaland (which I'm pleased to see is still a mainstay in the Spotify charts even today!).

It depends on what we count as singles, but maybe a scenario where an artist scores 3 top 10s on every album release week, doesn't do any collabs and doesn't ever have any other songs from their albums manage to chart could beat Madonna one day. Maybe an artist who releases multiple albums a year and is really frontloaded or something (so they don't have to worry about a 4th track charting low as they don't last long enough to hit ACR). The other possibility is another Glee Cast situation where an artist releases 5+ singles every single week but they're so popular that the top 3 always debut top 10. I don't think it's impossible for Madonna's record to be broken but it would definitely take a very extreme, and lucky set of circumstances which are so unlikely.