Eric_Blob

Happy by Pharrell (another one of the biggest hits of all time somehow) didn't even chart on its release week, and that was a soundtrack song too.

All The Lovers would have been the highest. I checked the Spotify chart a few times in 2010 and it was never too drastically different to the normal charts. Usually the pop songs were a bit lower, held back releases were a bit lower and indie/alternative and hip hop songs were a bit higher. So there's no way to prove it i guess but I can almost guarantee All The Lovers would have been top 20 on Spotify when it was out.

To be fair, 99% of the people in the world hate the UK. :lol: The corruption in this country is off the charts and the people in positions of power and influence are all lunatics. This country is crashing and burning and I'm enjoying every second of it because there is such evil going on today, it's 100% deserved.

I've seen it happen to hip hop songs as well. What happens is they stay on the Hot 100 for months as an album track, and then in their 16th week or whatever they get promoted to radio as a single so they don't get made recurrent after 20 weeks even if they're still outside the top 50.

It happens all the time that celebrities know the verdict in advance. It's got to the point where I just assume they always know in advance because it's so common.

The instrumentals of the Marvin Gaye and Ed Sheeran songs are almost the same. I was re-watching old episodes of Big Brother from the 00's about a year ago and in one of them they had a karaoke task (or something similar) and the Marvin Gaye song was used, and I was puzzled for ages because I was thinking how on Earth could they be singing Thinking Out Loud in 2005? But then I realised it was the Marvin Gaye song. But I agree as well that it's hard to say it's plagiarism, and there are other possible explanations for why that could've happened. I think Ed Sheeran likely knew in advance what the outcome would be, because I don't think he'd have made that statement about quitting music if he thought there was a realistic chance he could lose.

You make a good point, bit I don't think David Guetta is a good example to use because he's not faceless at all. He appears in a lot of his music videos, he does photoshoots, he goes on chat shows like Graham Norton. If he walked in any town or city here people would recognise him. A lot of other dance artists don't do those things and are pretty much faceless, at best you might hear an interview of them on the radio. In a lot of cases people don't even know whether they're 1 person or a group. I had no idea what Sigala looked like (until I googled him just now), even though I've been hearing his songs for 10 years now.

I'm surprised at the criticism for this tbh. The benchmark might be pretty low I guess, but I think it will be fun because every day every artist is inching closer to a billion UK streams. For me I would enjoy seeing the artists from the 80's, 90's, 00's, etc. eventually get the award in future years. They can always do another award for 10 billion streams or something which would be more exceptional. Yeah it's pretty much guaranteed Spice Girls, Sugababes and Kylie will all get it by the end of the decade at the latest (or maybe they already have it?).

I think Boy's a Liar was released in 2022 as well, so just 1 song. Calvin Harris will be in the top 10 in no time though.

Yeah I think in this country his most famous song is I Got U (unfortunately, the song's OK but he has sooooo much better ones). Ocean Drive's success seemed so random, because it was kind of a "flop" single at first here, but then I go on Youtube a couple of years later to listen to the song and it has hundreds of millions of views and I couldn't wrap my head around it. :lol: According to Wikipedia it was a year-end #1 in Poland and year-end top 10 in Ukraine and Hungary, also a smash hit in Russia, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Belarus, etc. I don't know how this happened exactly. I guess maybe there's some record label subsidiary for Central and Eastern Europe which decided to push the song hard and it did really well. So I assume that's why it's got massive streams, and the places where it was a massive hit, it's probably his highest charting song. Here it's probably more well-known now than The Giver and Real Life (and maybe Won't Look Back), but I think his most famous ones in the UK are the #1s tbh.

I predict 61 - 75k.

I have no idea, it seemed strange even at the time. But X Factor was huge and Simon Cowell was (very wrongly, in my opinion) considered to be completely running the music industry by many, so maybe that might have influenced it.

Maybe the label haven't given it any payola. Perhaps it's the song that Spotify's algorithm is most likely to play following David Kushner - Daylight if you have autoplay or go on its radio. That probably isn't the reason though. I think without label payola the autoplay/radio lists are too personalised to each account to have that sort of effect, and we would've seen loads of songs similar to Flowers getting big boosts when that was released.

I guess I might as well post this here since there's a discussion on it. I came up with my own ACR system and tried to calculate/estimate what the charts would be if I used it. The #1s for 2022 came out like this: Ed Sheeran - Merry Christmas (carry over from 2021) GAYLE - abcdefu (2 weeks) Encanto - We Don't Talk About Bruno (4 weeks) Ed Sheeran - The Joker And the Queen (1 week) Fireboy DML - Peru (1 week) Lost Frequencies - Where Are You Now (1 week) Dave - Starlight (2 weeks) Aitch - Baby (2 weeks) Harry Styles - As It Was (4 weeks) Jack Harlow - First Class (1 week) Cat Burns - Go (1 week) Sam Ryder - SPACE MAN (1 week) Harry Styles - Late Night Talking (1 week) Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill (4 weeks) LF System - Afraid To Feel (4 weeks) Central Cee - Doja (1 week) Beyonce - Break My Soul (2 weeks) Eliza Rose - BOTA (2 weeks so far) I stopped here because my method makes Christmas songs difficult to calculate because I have to go back to previous years to estimate what their ACR ratios would be, and it was tedious lol so I stopped. I might go back and continue this, or try and write a program that can do it automatically. I calculated the entire top 10 for each of these weeks using my system and I was actually really happy with the results, it really looked more like the charts from before streaming. There were a few quirks. As It Was, the biggest song of the year, only spent 10 weeks in the top 10, less than songs like Go and Crazy What Love Can Do (because they kept reaching new peaks and getting resets). But we have quirks like that with the current official chart anyway. I think the charts were realistic and not too drastically altered. All the #1s were songs that made #1 or 2 officially, the exception being Where Are You Now but it was a year-end top 10 hit iirc with great longevity so I think that's fine, and all of them apart from The Joker and The Queen I would say were actual hits. Most songs were peaking earlier. For example Kate Bush got #1 2 weeks early, LF System were 1 week early, I think BOTA was 1 week early as well. And once a song peaks with my method it falls down the chart gracefully, so no weird unnatural drops. the chart runs look more like from the physical era or download era. And it's also basically impossible for a song to stabilise and hang around for years with this method. Every week the ACR ratio is made stronger. Green Green Grass and As It Was certainly would not be in the top 40 right now. The lowest-peaking song officially that made top 10 with my method is Big Energy by Latto, which scraped in at #10 one week. All the other top 10s were official top 20 hits. It's not perfect, (I think people would probably complain that there aren't any super long-running #1s) but while I was doing this I was excited every week to plug in the new sales data and see what comes out, and I prefer my chart to the OCC's chart personally.

That's another song which I thought might be on the list haha.

I was curious where Lights would be because it "flopped" when it was a single in the UK but was massively successful in the US, so it probably gets in loads of playlists, TV shows, adverts, etc, because of that which would have helped its recurrent sales and streams.

There's actually LOADS. I watched a conspiracy theory documentary before on it lol. There's lots in music videos too. In recent years the most controversial one I can think of is Blurred Lines. It was accused of being sexist and also of promoting rape. I was at university at the time and mine didn't ban it, but a lot of others did. Which of course would just make it more popular. :lol: And it also had plagiarism accusations. And the uncensored music video too which got banned then put back on Youtube. And Miley Cyrus's performance of it on American TV. :lol: It seemed like it never ended with that song. I remember a lot of parodies of the song, lengthy opinion pieces criticising it, etc. Maybe like in the 80's or before there was a more controversial #1, but in recent times I can't think of anything. Killing In the Name certainly caused a media frenzy, but I didn't really hear anybody complaining that it was immoral or harmful. I think most people agreed with (or didn't mind) the purpose of the campaign and I actually reckon there were probably tens of thousands of people who bought both songs.

I've come across LOTS of videos of Peaches on Youtube in the past few days, but they're not the official uploads, so they would count as UGC streams, which I don't think count for the charts. So that might hurt its chance of charting a bit.

You know in a few years an AI will probably be able to make these TOTP episodes a reality.

Drake is in a similar situation to Ed Sheeran imo, where he's clearly in decline. So I think he may mass #1 tbh.

Am I understanding this correctly? The person in 200th place got over 200 million streams, whilst Queen, in 10th place, got a bit under 400 million streams? And D-Block Europe outstreamed like the likes of Adele and Elton John globally last year?!? Also, Dua Lipa is British? I genuinely thought she was a Serb for some reason.

My least favourite by far is I Don't Care. I don't really like Beautiful People much either. The favourite is hard to decide for me.

They really should not have got rid of the year-end top 200 imo. With only a list of 100, and most of it being old songs or songs leftover hits from the year before, I think a top 200 would help us see where more of the new hit songs land in comparison to each other. I know their reasoning is probably that it needs to match the size of the weekly charts (when the charts briefly became a top 250 in the mid-00s we got a year-end top 250 too, then both charts when back to 200 shortly afterwards), but I don't really understand why that HAS to be a rule.

I was actually taught in junior school that it was a million million. Thinking back to what school I was in, this must've been between 1999 and 2001. So maybe around that time it was still in use, although it's possible that it was just my one particular teacher. I remember we were taught it the other way around, that a billion is really a million million but that some foreigners only mean 1,000 million when they say it. By the time I was in senior school we were told to always assume it's 1,000 million. I was actually quite reluctant to use the new definition of a billion because I thought the one I was originally taught was more logical.

I actually think the big female pop stars get far worse in the "being successful but being called a flop because previous songs were bigger" department. A lot of male artists can under-perform or actually flop with barely anyone noticing or caring. Ed Sheeran seems to be the exception to this in my opinion, but there's a lot more vitriol directed at him, with the female pop stars there's it's mostly joking/teasing or posts with an "it's a shame" vibe that I see. Also, Ed did have a borderline flop song last year, The Joker and The Queen. I don't think it even made the year-end top 100 did it? And that was with it being out for the whole year and the single version out near the beginning of the year iirc. I don't think his new single will be like that, even if it doesn't pick up later on I think it will still actually end up being a hit by normal standards.