Eric_Blob

I'm gutted Give It 2 U isn't there. 2 Chainz, Robin Thicke, Dr. Luke and will.i.am made magic with that song.

I think there were two different things. There used to be a trend of putting music videos or live performances as adverts on YouTube, and those used to count to the Hot 100, which led to Soko, Lady Gaga getting some strange top 10 hits and some others lower down too. I think they stopped that mid-10s. I believe fan-made videos counted until shortly after Old Town Road was a hit. I think Kendricks Superbowl performance would still be able to count even today if it's uploaded to his own channel as it would essentially just be a "Live version", which normally are combined. If it's uploaded on a Superbowl channel I think it won't count. Not 100% sure though.

Do you know for sure it's being done manually? I don't know how happy I am with humans being able to edit Spotify streaming figures manually. Maybe it needs to be done to remove fraud, and computers doing it has its own flaws and exploits as we have all witnessed countless times, like with the suspicious behaviour of the song in question, but humans have flaws too. If one of the Spotify staff members hates manufactured pop music, for example, how can we trust they won't be biased, or even worse, just adjust their streams more to their liking? It's sad to say, but I think I'd rather a computer just count streams and a human not tamper with the numbers tbh. Sure, humans can program it to try and get the computer to ignore things like obvious spamming of a song 24/7 and things like that. But a human Spotify staff member just being able to add/subtract millions of streams to a song's figures, it doesn't sit well with me. Computers don't have emotions, beliefs, likes, dislikes, etc, so they are less biased and count the numbers.

2014 is my favorite from the list but I think that's just because of my age. I thought the pop music in 2016 was great (if you ignore all the Lean On clones), but I agree the charts were super boring to follow.

I'm honestly sure it came back in the mid/late 00's after downloads started counting for the chart. For context I found some website years ago that had PDFs of the year-end top 200 (250 for some years) and they looked like it was officially from the OCC. From the late 90s onwards. My old laptop I downloaded the PDFs on is destroyed but I used to read those charts occasionally so I have vague memories of them. So my vague memories could obviously be wrong, but I think it had a 3rd year in the top 200/250 later on. Sorry to be a pain lol. It would be cool if it makes it this year, its such a classic. And I really wish the OCC would publish longer year-end charts to the public. I understand their reasoning that they want it to be the same size as the weekly charts, but also, who really cares? A year is a pretty long time. I'd like them to go back to top 200 for year-end, if not more.

This is another one I think also made some year-end too 200s in the 00's. Or at least 1 I'm pretty sure.

I can't really answer your question unfortunately, but I did look through your playlists and Drake - Find Your Love and Eminem - No Love are there but I'm sure they made the top 40.

Chase & Status and Stormzy got a #1 in the UK last year, so obviously it is still possible for some to break through, but it's far from the norm now.

I was going to mention this. The live version was was initially getting most of the airplay too on Heart, Capital, Radio 1, etc. at the time for its 1st couple of weeks at #1. Then they gradually phased it out for the studio version, but there were a couple of weeks where it would be 50:50 which version you'd hear.

If Dog Days Are Over makes it this year I think that would be it's 6th year-end chart? And Chasing Cars has probably been in like 10 by now lol. Although some of those would have been when we had top 200 year-end charts. I was reading the year-end chart show thread for this year. It was a fun read, but honestly I think we should start adding year-end chart runs because there are so many repeats and re-entries these days. I know it's a lot of work though, but could be useful information to see how each song is trending, etc.

Also John Legend and Beyoncé have songs called Green Light.

I know what you mean. But if you go a cheesy pop club or New Years Eve party in the UK by actual human DJs, something like Call My Name by Cheryl Cole or The Ketchup Song, might get a play but they get overlooked on the Spotify playlists. And yeah, we do play Tik Tok and Timber over here too. If the human DJs and radio stations have room for all of them the Spotify playlists can do it too.

Just like the Christmas playlists, it seems like these New Year's playlists are very US-centric (to re-iterate, I doesn't matter that Charli XCX, Ed Sheeran, Amy Winehouse, etc. are British, they got famous in the US 10+ years ago). Things like S Club 7, Dizzee Rascal, Girls Aloud, Vengaboys, etc, should be charting today as they're just as beloved here as Kesha for example, but get overlooked due to not being famous in the US. It makes me sad for some reason.

It's honestly my favorite Spotify chart each year and has a ton of movement and loads of surprises and most of the biggest pop stars show up. We won't get another one like this all year.

Are they outselling Blinding Lights enough to overtake though?

I think he has loads of classic songs. And Baby By Me went viral this year so that probably helped a bit too.

I think for this discussion you have to differentiate between the international UK artists and the local ones. People like Adele, Ed Sheeran, Charli XCX, Harry Styles, etc, already made it big in the US 10+ years ago. The recent changes in the music industry aren't hurting them very much. It's the UK artists who never broke the US who are struggling the most as they don't get included (or even considered) on English-language playlists, like the Little Mix girls for example.

My favorite SZA song is Snooze, I absolutely adore it, I could listen forever.

When AI becomes better its going to be able to generate custom songs for every user based on their listening history. For example if you listen to nothing but mid-10's Taylor Swift songs AI will just be able to generate songs of that style for the rest of your life. At least I think that's the next logical step. I guess there's no way they could be counted for the chart though. But if we think monoculture is dead now, it could get far worse with everybody just having music and films and TV shows and books generated that cater perfectly to their taste that nobody else will experience.

There was a promotional campaign last year too for Brenda Lee, with no reset. Although I wouldn't actually be against Christmas songs being able to get resets. There's probably a dozen which could be able to reach #1 if reset. It would be better than Wham getting it every year.

In theory posting something on social media with 10s of millions of followers is fantastic promo, but it's happened countless times now that an artist has done that with flop singles. So I don't know how effective that really is tbh.

I thought it was pretty obvious that George Michael's death is what pushed Last Christmas to biggest Christmas song. It got a big boost after he passed and now it's many years later we can say it seems to be a permanent boost. If he was still alive Mariah would still be the top song for sure.

Can someone explain what's happened regarding Michael Buble?

I think it would've been completely unrecognizable. It would've had such a massive knock-on effect. The radio and MTV playlists would've changed to reflect the streaming artists, singles would be completely different too with album tracks being able to be streamed. The artists themselves would've released different music. Some artists we know and love may not actually ever have been signed.

That's probably the most female-dominated radio playlist I've ever seen. Not that it's a bad thing, there are a plethora or radio stations out there playing 90%+ males (if you're a rock, dance or rap station it can be hard to avoid that tbh).