Eric_Blob

They should do a point system to weigh the sales differently from different years when they do lists like these. For example, divide the sales that each song gets each year by the combined sales of the year-end top 100 (maybe only from the #3 - #100 positions so that anomalies like Candle In The Wind, Do They Know It's Christmas, Is This The Way To Amarillo, X Factor winner singles, etc. don't skew the results too much). And then add the numbers all back together. If they did something like that then Breathe would be in the top 3 (maybe even #1, but Cheap Thrills and Rockabye were also hugely successful no matter how you measure them), and Hair and No Lie would be lower than Temperature and Get Busy which is where they should be in all honesty.

I think a lot of the chart hits from 2012 were really, really awful to be honest (of course there were a lot of great ones though). There are up-beat songs with strong melodies like Unforgettable, Shape Of You, Cola, Mabel's new song, the new Gesafflestein/Weeknd song. I don't even know that many chart songs from the past few years (I was in prison for a while), so there's probably many more. And I'm not sure why you mentioned Sweet But Psycho of all things? I listened to it and it's a mid-tempo song and the synths in it are quite subtle? I guess it does have a prominent melody though.

No. Who on earth would expect that lol? Even people like Rihanna have never accomplished that. Usually it's people like Ed Sheeran, Take That, Coldplay, Adele, etc. who you might expect to have one of the 2 best-selling albums of the year.

They actually use these categories for UK radio stations as well, and Heart FM is classified as HAC. The biggest radio station classified as an AC in the UK is Radio 2. Heart FM does have an extremely slow turnover though, I certainly won't argue with that lol. But to be fair Capital FM is almost as bad even though it's meant to be a pop station.

I don't think it would have made much of a difference, both of them were already big when it was released, and even today not every song they feature on becomes a hit. Homemade Dynamite's remix came out at the same time as when Post Malone's old songs were all getting big surges on Spotify, so really it was good timing in that respect, but Homemade Dynamite didn't really benefit like all the other Post Malone songs, which I thought was strange at the time. Even his flop song with Justin Bieber and album tracks got a surge in streams and his songs like White Iverson, Go Flex, Candy Paint and others charting high on Spotify despite being old and previously "flopping". And this was all before Rockstar came out by the way, I think because of Congratulations his past discography started getting a lot of attention. Some people seem to think that Post Malone as an artist became big because of Rockstar, but given the data we have from streaming it was clearly the opposite. Rockstar was so successful because Post Malone as an artist had become big, and he was already big when Homemade Dynamite's remix was out. I think any song he released in place of Rockstar would have been successful at that time. I guess Khalid is more debatable, but he was certainly known at the time as well.

Off the top of my head, they can be strategic with when they add/remove songs to certain playlists, to make sure that they get an increase at the right time. You could even remove a song from a big playlist on week 8 and then re-add it on the very same playlist on week 9 for example to make it increase in streams over the previous week.

I'm OK with ACR (I think it's overall a good thing because the charts would be so slow without it), but that 3 year rule really pissed me off. What I find funny is that when they added ACR, Despacito still managed to stay #1 shortly after even with the new rules hurting it, and then after they added that 3 year rule Three Lions still managed to get to #1. So I suspect if they add another new rule to hurt the Christmas songs then Mariah will still get #1 somehow, that's just how things seem to work haha.

Rockabye is the best one (and I don't even like it THAT much).

Taio Cruz is STILL around!? :blink: Glad that he doesn't get in the charts much anymore. Nicky Romero isn't exactly a treat either. He produced the song Right Now on Rihanna's album, even though they credited it to David Guetta. I've finally listened to most of the biggest 2017 chart hits. Unforgettable and Cola are AMAZING! :wub: It's a classic song now imo, it still gets played a lot. I wouldn't have imagined it would have been a surprise #1. Were people just buying any song with Sean Paul on it? :lol: DJ Khaled should re-release I'm On One. It would actually make the top 40 this time, and it's still his best song out of the ones I've heard.

There was an interesting article I read about the US music industry once. I can't remember exactly what it was about, but the main gist of the article was that to get around payola rules, some of the higher-ups would invite other higher-ups to a "nice, expensive dinner". There was another story I read once about Katy Perry's record label sending cakes out to loads of radio stations in "celebration" of one of her single releases. My point is, there are loads of creative ways you can do payola without actually doing it. Not to mention, they could simply just be lying. Obviously a lot of the big Spotify playlists aren't natural.

Well, you can compare it to last week's chart (without the Drake songs). For example, the new rules seem to benefit the country songs, almost all of them have climbed compared to last week if you remove the Drake songs.

I watched one of his videos a while ago (because I saw one of his songs in the top 100 and I thought judging by the artist name that it was going to a dance DJ or something, the song wasn't what I expected :lol:). His video was set in an American high school. And now I see him doing a charity single for the NHS, so he must be British. Yet he's pretending to be American in his music videos? This decade's Natasha Bedingfield I guess.

That's true, but to be fair, I knew people who thought iTunes #1 = official #1 even back when it was a sales chart.

Some of them might find out if Three Lions misses out because of it. I'm sure some journalists would mention it.

You might need to put that phrase in big, bold, capital letters! (And I'm actually being serious, becauase this is 1,000 songs long, you could get asked this question 30 times). I like the countdown btw. Your formula seems to be fairly good so far as well.

To the last bit, I hope so. I'm not opposed to Youtube being added, but I don't want only half of the streams to be counted and some songs to be disadvantaged unfairly because fan-made lyric video gets a lot of the views. And also, I made a remix of Disclosure - White Noise and put it on Youtube years ago. I made it completely from scratch (although I copied some melodies from it, I didn't sample any part of the original audio, not even the vocals) and after about a week it got taken down for copyright infringement. I don't know if their record label manually scrawled through Youtube to find every amateur remix and flag them for copyright violations, or if the "audio detect" tools that Youtube have are THAT good. However, I think either way these unofficial remixes could likely be monetised. People are money hungry anyway, the record labels would probably be losing millions in total if they aren't monetising the fan-made/unofficial videos, so I would suspect they are being monetised.

Um what?! This seems like a terrible, terrible idea. Here comes a rant (although there is a chance I'm mis-interpreting this, but I think the idea of counting streams only from channels run by major record labels and not by "normal" people is awful): This unofficial lyric video of Dua Lipa - New Rules has 77 million views: This trap remix if New Rules has 46 million views: Even if UK streams are less than 10% of those, that's an awful lot of streams not counted by the UK charts... And those are only two of the biggest videos. If we include all the onofficial remixes and unofficial lyrics videos, we're talking about hundreds of millions of streams (globally, but still a shit-load for the UK), not counted by the OCC. Do people really think people watch the fan-made lyric video just to appreciate the font? Or to appreciate the shade of brown used for the background? Of course people are watching this video for the song. Saying people only play this video for the visuals is like saying people only buy albums to look at the album covers and read the booklets. This puts pressure on every mainstream artist (who cares about the UK charts at least) to have lyric videos and to put them on their official Youtube channels, or else fans will make lyrics videos and steal the streams, streams that won't be eligible for the UK charts. And we'll have this situation of Little Mix, Ariana Grande, whoever else's fans, complaining all the time because the record label never put a lyric video on their official channel for whatever their current single is and a fan-made lyric video managed to get 100 million streams. I can imagine them saying for years "This would have got to #1 if the OCC counted the streams from the unofficial lyric videos". And it hurts dance music as well. There are so many unofficial dance music channels on Youtube where they upload new songs and remixes (often submitted by normal people like you and me), where they can get a lot of views, but they're not going to be counted now? They count them for the US chart, and honestly they make practically no difference, but in the UK they could make a difference as dance music is bigger here. Gorgon City & Duke Dumont - Real Life got 5.1 million streams on an unofficial channel that had no visuals on the video, and 2.9 million streams on the music video on it's official channel. Are the OCC going to count Spinnin' Records, Subsoul, Trap Nation, Selected. (this is the channel that the Real Life audio got lots of streams from), Chill Nation, etc. as "official" or not? I'm pretty sure some of these big channels (there are dozens of them) are run by a random guy living in his mother's basement. Maybe some of them have made loads of money off them and can pay the OCC to be counted as official, or have sold them off to major record labels, but you get my point. Will the OCC count these? And someone said it will help Indie music. Well, possibly, if they're signed to a major record label who have given them an account connected to VEVO. But what happens if a group of guys from Manchester start a band, record a song, put it on Youtube and it goes viral. Will the OCC not count this? Will they be forced to sign to a record label to be counted in the charts? If they can get the song on iTunes and Spotify, will the downloads and Spotify streams count, but in Youtube's database it will show up as 0 Youtube streams because it's coming from an "unofficial" music channel? Billboard in the US count everything (official and unofficial Youtube streams), and they don't seem to have any problems. There were a few strange things early on, but I can think of hardly anything in the the past couple of years. I would like to know their reasoning. I suspect that major record companies did this because they want to keep power over the music industry and more control over what charts. They obviously bribe whoever determines what's in the Spotify playlists, now they're saying that only the Youtube channels that THEY upload to can be used for counting towards the chart? Either that, or the OCC is scared of a song getting high up the charts once every 2 years because of being used in the background of an advert on Youtube? Well it happens all the time in the iTunes charts that songs go high because of use in adverts. Are they scared that cover versions that go viral on Youtube will get into the charts? That happened all the time in the past with fake cover versions of songs charting. And you know what, maybe it would have been kind of nice, and technically more accurate, if Pixie Lott and Conor Maynard's cover version of Despacito made the top 40 last year, as is got 127 million streams? Are they scared that people will try and manipulate the charts through Youtube? I'm sure there were about 30 Facebook campaigns to effect the charts in the early half of the decade. We survived weekly Glee Cast dominations and millions of charity songs going to #1 and Precision Tunes going top 10 and Ding Dong The Witch is Dead and all these boybands getting artificially high chart positions, and now the OCC are scared of counting unofficial Youtube streams because a "Soko situation" might happen once every 2 years. Seems odd to me. I hope I'm mis-interpreting this. But I'm not sure what else they could mean by "unofficial" or "user-generated" other than "Anything that's not controlled by a major record label"? Because, for example, if we started a "Buzzjack Song Contest" channel where we uploaded the audio of every song submitted into the contest, and some of them went viral and got 10s of millions of views, how else would the OCC decide if we counted as "official" or not?

Youtube has already been doing this for years. Definitely since 2014. There was a song called Rich Gang - Lifestyle, which a lot of people found funny because half of it was complete gibberish (and this was back when "mumble rap" wasn't so common yet). Then people found out that if you typed "Song that makes no sense" or "Song that sounds like gibberish" into Youtube then Rich Gang - Lifestyle would be the first result. So Youtube has definitely been doing this since 2014. Type in things like: 'Is all it takes' - Gives you One Kiss 'Square root of 69' - Gives you What's My Name? 'Song that samples Lauryn Hill' - Gives you Nice For What 'Annoying amphibian' - Gives you Axel F 'Spanish song' - Gives you Despacito

Well, if it's true it would be interesting. The Youtube charts are very strange because they manage to be both faster AND slower than the Spotify and iTunes charts. Youtube is "faster", because songs can often get a random massive spike for a few days and then drop again, which doesn't happen often on Spotify. I think there would be slightly more potential for old songs to re-enter the chart (which hasn't happened often recently). However, because a lot of songs can fluctuate from week to week, there would probably be quite a few songs avoiding ACR for quite a long time due to more-or-less random fluctuations. Youtube is "slower", because the big hits that are consistent hang around FOREVER. If you think Shape Of You and Despacito hung around for ages on iTunes and Spotify, then Youtube is on a whole other level. So I can't decide if it would make the charts more or less entertaining. However, if Youtube really is getting added, this would be the perfect time for OCC to change the stream-to-sale ratio if they want to.

Surely listening to random songs from playlists would give a result similar to what the Spotify top 50 is anyway? It seems to me the Spotify charts are heavily influenced by playlists. (Note that I said "similar", not "identical"). However, what I really meant was the music, rather than individual songs. Someone said that they think the quality of music would be better if they excluded the free users, which I think is unlikely. For example it might be reasonable to think that adult contemporary or alternative/indie songs might do a lot better if you only look at the paid streams, but I don't think that will happen because the Apple Music chart is similar to the Spotify chart and if I understand correctly everybody who uses Apple Music has to pay (you can't use it for free). I don't think it would make a huge difference to be honest.

I think paid and free users listen to roughly the same things. I think for Apple Music you have to pay, and its charts are quite similar to the Spotify charts.

I'm not surprised about its Spotify performance because it always used to be selling well on iTunes before that as well.

I think Clean Bandit will be #1. The only song I know of the contenders is Better Now and I quite like it although I think it's about average for Post Malone.

The artist is Owen Benjamin, and if I'm thinking of the right guy, he's a Youtuber and comedian (who I've actually heard of before). And he's not even British. YFAOwr1lRTw

Yes, Psycho, as well as the past 2 weeks of Nice For What, and most likely Psycho next week as well, are all amongst the weakest #1s of the whole decade. Another weak period was when Cheap Thrills was at #1, but apparently these #1s are even weaker. Even though Psycho and Nice For What have been #1 the past few weeks, there are other weeks where their current performance would have only put them at only #7 instead of #1. Maybe other weeks where they'd be even lower. Nice For What and Psycho both got great "points" at their peaks, so it's not like they've not been successful, but now they're just hanging around at the top because nothing else is doing any better. Next week would honestly be a good time for someone who's desperate to get a #1 to release a single. Because at the moment you can get there with half the sales + airplay + streaming that you would need in some other weeks. After the next big hit comes along, we don't know how long it will be until it's this easy to get to #1 again.