Graham A

I suppose that what really got up the record companies noses was the fact that when records were released after weeks of airplay, it didn't stop some session musicians bringing out the same track being played by a well known artist as a download. Which lead to these "crap" covers making the charts. The record company had no choice but to release the original earlier than it should have been, to kill off the cover version!

A more expensive album would also be limited by the people that can afford to buy it. But a cheaper album will also sell more copies, in the reverse of that. Budget priced albums as far as I know are not allowed in the album charts. But under this system, selling more copies doesn't mean a higher position, so they can be included. iTunes also discounts track downloads, selling them at 59p rather than 99p. This can affect the chart position selling more tracks as it is cheaper. But that affect is limited by the Retail Price Chart. One thing the Retail Price chart does is put back the public back into contributing to streaming and making the chart. At the moment, nobody can solo get a sale on streaming, whereas if you download or buy a physical copy you count as one unit sale. Since the chart would count all streaming and then assign the payment to what the user pays. The current chart is acting like streaming is a digital download of 99p, adjusting the number of streams as the service grows. Thus making it look like that streams never existed. As more people streamed, they even adjusted the levels down so that it wouldn't look like massive amounts of units were being consumed. Since Spotify actually produces a list of the weekly streams for the UK, you might be interested to see how the price relates to the streams. Based on the £0.005p figure. The Number One = £15,076.30p 100 = £3,753.64p Of course these figures could go up or down, if Spotify include advertisement funded tracks, or higher rate households. Not certain how you would define the price of add funded streams?

I have mentioned this as an option on UKMIX, but for those not connected with that forum, I will explain more here. Firstly, it would be up to the OCC to do this, but I believe they could do it. It could be done as an extra chart even! The first thing is that sales would stop being based on UNIT sales, but on the retail price the public pays for each unit. This is fairly straightforward when it comes to most formats, but more difficult for streaming. So instead of one download sale, it would be 0.99p or if they are reduced in price that price per unit. The same with 7- inch singles, 12- inch singles, cassettes etc. So if a 7-inch single is selling for £15.99p then it would count at that and not one unit as at present. Now you can begin to see the difference. So ten downloads would only achieve sales of £9.90p. Where's the one 7- inch at £15.99 would easily beat them! As I said, streaming is more difficult. Since you have to work out what everyone pays for each stream. I suppose that would have to be agreed between the streaming services and the OCC, or the BPI. Nevertheless, I do have a way of doing it. So if a streaming service charges each customer £10.99p per month. According to one website, the average stream per household is 2,000 per month. So if you divide these figures, it comes in at £0.005495p per stream. Or simply £0.005p. The OCC would have to be supplied with the streams for each price range. And the average streams per household would have to be agreed on. The albums could also be done in the same way. I think the impact there would be greater than on the singles charts, since vinyl albums go for much greater money than a CD or download. I have been monitoring the OCC sales for the last few months. With the figures Alan Jones gives us, when he breaks the down into the units, I can tell you that I don't think Alex Warren would have even made the top, since he has only been on streams and downloads and that generally is not enough to make a record top. For example, on the 2 May: (55) Oasis - 7,620 at £13.99p = £106,603.80p (1) Alex - streams = £33,551.50p + Downloads = £2,118.60p A Retail Sales chart would end the need for ACR, as streaming would not get its way all the time. Meanwhile, the physical singles would make the top 100 even selling low numbers of units, due to the higher price the public pays for such units. You only have to look at the OCC's own physical chart to see that records in the top ten are not making the 100. By the way, the Retail Sales is not the same as what an artist gets.

I remember the reason for the switch to a Friday Chart date. At the time it was a popular thing for bands and record companies to get fans to buy up the records, thus ensuring often a number one hit. Releasing on Monday for the Sunday chart would do this. However, if records were released on Friday, with the chart on Sunday, it would mean that sales would be reduced and not enough for the number one spot. The Record Industry feared that record companies would have ignored the Friday date and continue to use the Monday date of release to get the record top by Sunday. So they moved the chart to Friday, so they could still get the full week of sales. Of course, what happened within a short time of its introduction is that the acts that used this system a lot, vanished, plus the sales pattern changed. Where records could climb to the top slowly.

The OCC charts are big joke now. They have always been a bit silly, but never as bad as they are them moment. The problem is that the OCC have two competing interests trying to take control of the charts. And try as they might the OCC are the Industry charts and have to make a compromise, but it simply can't work. First competitor is the streaming market. The other is the sales market. To get them to balance the "stream" is treated as a sale. But streaming are never sales, no matter how much they adjust them. Sales by definition have a limit. Streaming has no limit. But the two markets will not concede to the other. And so the OCC has to shunt between the two sides. What should have happened to the charts is that streaming should have taken over completely. But the sites still selling the records and of course part of the OCC would not allow that. Or you could argue that the OCC should have kept it a sales only chart, no streams at all, but of course that would have upset the other side of the Industry. The main issue over the charts is getting shut of records that are popular with the public. The sales chart had a way of doing that naturally. Nobody keeps buying the same track over and over again. On most of the main downloading sites you can't actually do it. Since after purchase once, it tells you that you have purchased the track, if you try again. If your file is deleted accidently or on purpose you can still download it again for free. And it doesn't count towards the charts. However streaming has no limits on how many times you can listen. So there is no way of getting shut of records. Of course if someone does bring an album out that has 16 to 20+ tracks on it then people will download the tracks off it individually or buy the album. However there is a limit. So by week two of the release of this albums track sales will go into decline, by week three some of the tracks will fall so low in sales to drop out of the 100 chart and so on. Yet in streaming there is no limit and in fact more people could start listening more because the tracks are part of a chart, which is displayed on streaming sites. The only way to solve this problem is for the OCC to put some very strict rules on streaming of the most popular records. But if streaming does win over the sales side of things as it appears to be doing, they are just putting off what most come to past, a chart of the most popular records. But the chart has always been a sales chart. But streaming in full control is not a sales chart. It would be a chart of who's got the biggest marketing budget or fan base. Which is what we are seeing since streaming was introduced. However it's a chart few people are interested in.

I agree totally with you. But at the moment Spotify the biggest streaming service at the moment pays next to nothing to the artists. One artist had millions of streams, but the money they got from Spotify wouldn't even pay for a year's subscription to the site! At the moment the only ones making money are Bieber and Drake. My argument is that it will have to stop sooner or later. I predict sooner.

Nothing's for free. Streaming is paid for by advertising if it is free. The cost of adverts puts the price of the things that everyone uses that are done by this method. Streaming is new, so those who stream tracks for nothing are simply getting away with not paying for it now. But Record Companies are greedy bast*rds and so are the people who make the music. They will put a lot of pressure to secure more money from streaming. And frankly the advertising revenue will just not cover that, especially when streaming costs go up. So the gravy train for those who spung there music for free will come to end sooner or later.

If streaming has become dominant than you reduce the streaming ratio not increase it. When downloads took over from physical they didn't say because physicals are more expensive than downloads, we will say two downloads to one physical. So why alter it for streaming? What has happened is that there are two pressure groups pressing on the OCC. One is in favour of streaming and the other is in favour of sales. Clearly one of them has been more successful over the other with this ruling. One of the groups thinks that streaming is damaging the Music Industry. It's great if your Bieber or Drake. But crap if you can't get new records into the top 75 due to the fact Drake or Bieber have got 15 tracks in the chart each. When there is only 2 in the sales 75.

I don't get the mentally behind this. Streams are supposed to be on the increase, downloads in decline. This to me sounds like either they have made a terrible mistake introducing the streaming level that high, or the sales are not in decline and streams are going to fall off soon. Perhaps the record companies have decided that switching to streaming charts is a mistake. And that they can't flog new products to people because of it, because everyone is just listening to Bieber or Drake rubbish and not buying any new records. Great for big name artists. Crap for 90% of the Music Industry. Spotify won't be very pleased that's all I can say.

They are. Which surprises me as iTunes could have done both streaming and downloads. So the X-Factor must have fallen out with iTunes. It's a bit weird since it was not long ago that a record was rush released when a X-Factor singer download had hit the top of the iTunes sales chart. A fact they made a great deal of publicity about. It seems crazy to me to put them on a site which is locked to the public and can't access without registering. As the above link shows. As a matter of interest are the X-Factor eligible for Spotify's own chart? iTunes at first did not put X-Factor acts in their own charts, but later let them in. The reason being that it would be unfair to the competition. My own Real Chart allowed ALL the X-Factor songs in, but as it's a SALES only chart, all streamed records are excluded. The Official Chart Company are liars when they say records have stop selling, they are just adjusting the figures to make it look like they are. Easy enough to do when they never registered more than 30% of sales in the first place.

Many acts don't care about chart positions anyway and since streaming came along, they have little to care about anyway, because the singles chart doesn't relate to how much money they make. You could sell a million with streams and still get a check for less than a year's subscription to Spotify. Record companies are always interested in the chart positions. Because they still make money out of them.

James Masterton noted how regular missing data is these days. He said in the past chart insiders would get a list of those that failed to provide the data for the week on a separate sheet. He says now the OCC have stopped the practice. Though they might supply information to the big players in the Record Industry. I understand it's the Thursday part of the chart that seems to be the main problem. Some acts like the Stone Roses have been bringing out records before the Friday date. Thus if data is missing on Thursday the data cannot be estimated, because you can set up a computer program to fill in blanks when you have no data for the sales pattern. One way around this would be to allow missing data to be added the following week. But the chart companies never seem to have used that. Possibly because it could be used as way to hype a certain record. But of course the sales of the previous week really should be in the previous week, not in the current week. Instead the charts seem to have been revised. And missing data that has been found added to the chart. This practice has been found on the OCC website, where charts don't match those published at the time. Both singles and album charts. It's ironic that despite the latest technology the chart companies still have problems with data suppliers not getting data in on time. Though in the past it was caused by the Post Office not delivering on time. But also the shops not sending out the data in time. It just goes to prove that despite instant data transfer technology, a commercial company can screw the system up!

I thought I made it clear. Those figures are not worth the paper they are written on. If you believe in any sales figures put out by the Official Charts company then you might as well believe that nobody landed or walked on the moon.

It is a sales only chart. The OCC make the streams up to say they are sales! The streaming element is just a mathematical figure arrived at by the people who falsely produce the chart. They have adjusted it so even the streams represent a core figure of people listening to music. It's then adjusted further, because despite advanced technology, the companies that offer streaming services can't get all their figures in on time. The Official charts are a joke. Made up by a series of commercial companies who have vested interests in keeping the public in the dark about how many records are sold each week and the BBC which is only interested in broadcasting a chart that doesn't look like a chart from just one commercial firm that of iTunes, which is what it used to look like. The Drake record is simply a clone of Bieber. Give a person a big fan base and streaming and you can keep records at number one for ages. Sales have indeed drop down, but not to 20%. If they had dropped that low albums would not be advertised on TV, it wouldn't even pay the cost of making records at 20% and streaming pays peanuts! It wouldn't even pay for the drinks and drugs that these pop stars consume.

I used to use streaming services to record the tracks to keep. But it was so time consuming, they also jumped, plus the adverts were annoying too. In the end I switched to downloading. And have stayed doing that. I would buy Music Videos, but you can't really do that in the UK. iTunes does have something on those lines, but it's a small scale operation and restricted in what you can do with them. So it's a none starter. Therefore the only option is to use a YouTube downloader and get them that way. The inability to download Music Videos and the industry's lack of support for setting up download sites, or letting other retailers sell them, is plain stupidity on the record companies part. Music Videos cost a great deal of money to make and not to sell them on a wide scale operation is sheer madness. £2 for a music video is not an unreasonable price to offer, so why is the Music Industry not selling them?