Umi

Can you imagine 'Stay' being played at parties?

The spread of performance between the songs would suggest to me that there's a meaningful organic element to it versus Spotify just throwing Christmas music en masse at people, or businesses turning on playlists. As we get closer to Christmas and people/businesses just throwing on Christmas playlists becomes more prominent, we will see the Christmas songs clump together quite closely, but for now, Mariah at #31 while Brenda Lee is at #145 would suggest to me that this is mostly driven by individuals seeking out particular Christmas songs they like.

It might be worth you giving No Shame a try, they have quite a lot of DNA in common even if No Shame is less narratively dominant. If your least favourites on this album are the more laidback songs then you might not enjoy the more subdued soundscape of No Shame though.

Well me thinking we must be close to the peak on the Monday numbers didn't quite work out! I'm guessing Friday numbers will be yet another new peak and then maybe the Saturday update will be the first decline? Would be amazing if she could keep defying the odds but the increases have slowed over the last couple of days (+1.0 million on Tuesday, 0.7 on Wednesday, 0.4 on Thursday). Hoping to see Pussy Palace in the top 10 next week!

I agree, this feels like the most unexpected chart event in some time and it's been really enjoyable to watch. I am really curious if today is the peak or if there is any more room to grow from here. I kind of feel like we must be at the top of the wave now.

This is quite random, but Million Dollar Bill having a Platinum cert is absolutely baffling to me. The song is sitting on less than 50 million streams on Spotify but it somehow managed to shift 200k units in the UK in just over 3 years between 2020 and 2023? The UK must be massively over-represented in that song's global numbers.

I've been recording Sinitta's performance on British and Maltese Spotify top 50 charts for 26 years and I'm getting increasingly worried about how long this period of missing data in my spreadsheet is going to get!

They're not down as much as I expected honestly, it looks like about 10% or so? Not huge considering how long it was down.

She's quite unlucky with the periods her biggest hits were released in. Streaming can help hits from the 2000s fix their under-certification if they're remembered well enough, but Kylie's still a pretty weak streamer unfortunately. Looking at her certification history and her current streaming numbers, I'm most optimistic about In Your Eyes and Love at First Sight having upgrades coming in the next couple of years, but once you leave the Fever era it's pretty slow going.

I imagine that situations like Jade's make British record labels tear their hair out. Pre-streaming, there is not a chance that a British artist could have a breakthrough hit like this and then essentially have to start from square one again for their follow-up singles. Localised success has become extremely fragile compared to years past. I agree that HHUK's lack of interest in supporting the local music industry is a problem in a world where radio stations can't do that job anymore, but it also feels like it would only be a bandaid on the issue even if that changed. Playlisting is mostly global, and social media (also global) is more important than ever before to what songs take off. The only real way to opt out of that globalised promotional space is via language barrier. The result of this is the US and UK charts moving in sync in a way that they never did pre-streaming, while often being rather out of sync with non-Anglophone markets. If you tightly integrate the promotional space of two music markets, the larger one will inevitably drive the trends, and that will generally lead to the smaller market's industry decaying as their artists struggle to access the promotion they need. Do we know if the share of British artists in the top 40/100 has actually dropped at all versus say, 10/15/20 years ago? If it has, I fear that may just be how things are going forward.

Paloma feels like a good case study of how bad Radio 1's artist-level playlist policy is and how much more sensible their playlist would be if they made decisions more consistently based on song. I actually think it made sense for them to drop her when they did - her second album was a pretty sharp turn into Radio 2 territory and the single they dropped her for ('30 Minute Love Affair') really didn't have any business on the Radio 1 playlist. But she returned to making much more contemporary music after this album and continued having hits, and it would have made sense to return to supporting her when her music fit in with the Radio 1 audience again. Instead she was essentially blacklisted forever for the sin of briefly going a bit MOR. The idea that everything or nothing by an artist should be playlisted, regardless of sound or commercial success, has always been stupid. I'm glad that such bad policy no longer has such an outsized impact on the charts.

I don't believe Elton and Britney's Hold Me Closer ever touched the Radio 1 playlist? I might be misremembering. That was a #3, Platinum-certified song.

Basic Instinct was only certified Silver in 2022, how on Earth has it shifted enough to be Gold in less than three years? Nothing on that album streams remotely well and none of its singles are certified.

Girls this is unlistenable. Admire the attempt to push the boundaries but I never want to hear this again in my life.

I think this is a discussion worth having but I think it's important to start it by acknowledging that even pre-streaming, it's never really been possible to compare different eras of the chart against each other. Changes in dominant format and music industry norms over time mean that records from the 90s don't compare very well against records from the early 00s, or the late 00s, or the mid-10s, etc, even though on paper all of those time periods were all tracking the same thing (music purchases week on week). We all know that everything released in the mid-2000s is wildly undercertified (but with inflated peaks) in comparison to songs released even a few years later, for example. With that said, I do agree that the transition to the streaming era is the most fundamental change to how the chart works that we've ever had, because the chart is simply tracking something completely different to what it did before. We've gone from measuring music acquisition to music consumption, and we are trying to maintain continuity through that change even though it's arguably impossible. We've moved from a chart which didn't care at all about how often people engaged with a piece of music once they acquired it to one where the intensity of engagement with a song over long durations of time is essentially the only thing that matters. It doesn't really make sense to label these two periods as being comparable. If I was in the business of strictly trying to use streaming data to recreate the purpose of the music charts of the sales era (because simply going back to tracking sales is not reasonable at this point), I'd be really interested to see what a chart based on first-time unique (on-demand) listeners would look like, if streaming services were able to provide that data on a weekly basis. I would expect it to be noticeably more frontloaded than the download era charts, particularly for artists with strong playlist support, and a first-time curiosity stream is not the same thing as a sale. But it would return the charts to tracking how many new people had engaged with a song in a given week in some way. I will say, I think there's actually a lot of merit to tracking music consumption even if it's a break from historic norm, and I think it would be a mistake to return to a time where people's consumption of music is totally irrelevant to the charts. It feels appropriate to me that a song having enduring appeal should be in some way reflected in its metrics, whether that be in its chart run or its certifications.