Graham A

I would like to see a streaming site do live music, debates, phone ins. Also Radio pays considerably more money to the artists than any of the current streaming sites. Like it or not, if you stream music you are just robbing performers of the income they would get. If the people who stream had to pay the real cost of the streams they would switch back to downloads or just go back to illegal means of obtaining music.

Radio and the public does not decide what will be a hit. It's just a question of who's got the best marketing policy and money around to ensure what people hear. If the record companies or some clever people want to convince those that stream records to stream a record, then the people that do will do so and think, like those that posted before me, plus some afterwards, they have made a record a hit. Even the people that campaign for records to be hits on the likes of Facebook are simply responding to a marketing plan. Admittedly not one thought up by a record company. But who really cares, it all goes into the money pot. As long as radio has lots of people listening to it then marketing people will target those people into liking a record. As for streaming making hits, it's actually slowing that process down. If you look at the radio stations playlist for the whole of the UK, there is much more new material than in the whole of the streaming chart.

Many Beatles tracks have actually recently been removed from YouTube. Or blocked.

Amazon do have all the Beatles tracks for download! Beatles Amazon store?

If Google Play can sell them then they are losing their exclusive rights. What happened with iTunes last time is that they advertised the fact you can download tracks and the tracks that were advertised sold the most. I have not seen adverts much for streaming sites before, so I don't think it will have a big impact as far as streaming is concerned. If the other download sites have them that is a different kettle of fish. There are loads of older people who download from the likes of Amazon, more so than iTunes and they will want certain Beatles tracks.

What about the rest of the download sites. Are they getting them too?

Bieber in the UK is simply benefiting from the streaming rules. His big fan base ensures that his records stay high. If it was just a sales chart he would be able to dominate that charts for a few weeks tops, since the fans have to buy his records, once they have them - end of chart life. Not so with streaming, his fans can ensure that his records stay high, by doing what they like to do anyway just listen to the records. They don't even have to try to keep him top, there at that many of them it just happens. Oddly the fact that the streaming keeps the records high, people who still buy records then hear about him so the cycle encourages even more popularity for him. Sadly it's turned the UK charts into the Justin Bieber is God Chart. Not that anyone cares about the charts anymore!

Streaming is popular because it's cheap or free. But experience of music and life in general shows that doesn't last. Of course when you have to start paying for it then it's not that economical to stream. I don't see people rushing out to rent houses, when they prefer to buy them. Streaming is no different to that. You are simply renting music from streaming sites. OK by the record companies of course. My worry is with streaming is that it will turn into what happened with iTunes, everyone buys from there and no competition. It seems to be happening even now with Spotify, so it can only get worse.

The trouble with the people on here is they think the Official Chart is created for them. IT'S NOT!!!! It's created for the Record Industry - a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes... Sorry slipping into Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy mode for a minute there... However it is they who decided how the chart is compiled what goes into it and what come out of it. Nobody else. They certainly don't listen to any chart fans. Who wanted the chart moved to Friday? The record companies, because they didn't want to stop records losing out on two days of record sales. Or records entering at the top spot. If they want 100% streams, or a sales chart that is dominated by streams they will do it. They won't ask the public about it. In fact they even convince people that people are not buying records anymore much, by just hiding a few hundred thousand sales under the carpet.

There are no chart rules on that subject. Every song can be promoted and usually is before it's official released. Radio often get records before they are released. It's only recent that On Air On Sale has become accepted as normal in the UK. Even then certain DJ's might get an exclusive of a new record before other stations get it and it goes on sale. The only rules that would effect a record are those concerned with dodgy ways of promoting records. Giving out tea-shirts, tickets to shows and other merchandise with records, often free! If she did pull out due to a record not being released, it's entirely down to the artist or management of her label. They might not want her to sing at some venue with no record to go out and buy.

It's an interesting that if a "physical" record does become valuable and even though the recording of it is generally in copyright, nobody will actually peruse you for a share of the money that you will get from the sale of the said record even if the sale exceeds thousands of pounds! Though in the future I would have thought 3D printers will make it very easy to copy these physical singles, pushing the value down. People will probably make physical singles of the download tracks on their computer!

The only person that "definitely" knows what a record sells is those that work for the Official Charts Company. All other information given out about sales, is speculation or record industry figures that might not be true-full. You can ask the Official Charts Company what a record sells. But since the industry is a bit secretive on these facts, generally they don't issue the information. Unless they want to make a point, many times either very inaccurate or often open to interpretation, on these points. Especially if Alan Jones from Music Week is involved.

Ben Haenow sold a total of 874,000 copies without any streams included, so I do think he does work for the Head of the Official Charts Company Fiddling Sales Division! Careful there you shouldn't know that :cool:

The CD total was 47,001 the Download total 208,602 so that adds up to 255,603. If you add streaming that takes it to 261,240. Or do you work for the Official Charts Company as the head of fiddling the sales figures for every record? I have been after this guy for ages! He must be out there somewhere cause they do reduce the sales figures for every record going. Can I out you! :dance:

Don't you mean 255K in total?

Since streaming doesn't sell records it's not possible to have a million seller from streaming at all. The way things are going we might get a million seller from vinyl :heehee:

The average payout for Spotify (Feb 2014) was $0.00521 and you need about 140 streams to match 1 iTunes download there. Nokia are the best for paying out at $0.07411 and under 10 streams to match 1 iTunes sale. In-fact nearly all sites payout better than Spotify with the exception of MySpace Music. The worst of the lot is Amazon Cloud where you need 5,862 streams to match 1 iTunes sale. Presumably the Official Company does not take this into account when calculating the charts, which must be a major failing on their part. You would think that sites such as Nokia should be allowed more counts to the charts than an the 5 streaming allowed per person, while the 3 worst offenders have having much higher counts per person than the five. A simple formula based on streams to download price equivalents per site is better than just allowing 5 streams per person. It might even encourage the worst payout sites to pay more to artists!

You think it's bad! Try being an artist!!! This year Spotify sent a royalty check to an artist with a huge amount of streams. The artist sent them a thank you back, with the message - another one of them and I will be able to get the year's premium subscription to Spotify!

That might be true. But it doesn't mean a record wasn't selling. It just means it wasn't selling well in the chart shops used by BMRB. Records back then were sent out in bulk to the record shops, when first issued, so without checking each of the record shops to see what was selling, the only way a record company knew a record started to sell well is when shops ran out of stock and requested more. The only other way is if it sold in the chart shops. One record company executive is on the record as saying 'judging by our records chart positions if we are hyping records we are not very good at it!'.

Radio One always had a playlist. It was probably an add on since the days of the Pirate Stations. But it was worse than that. All the shows had a script, even down to fluff Freeman's "allright". How many times he said etc! Each show had a producer and each show was cleverly put together. Records could be marked restricted in the BBC record library and DJ's wouldn't play them. The BBC and all the Radio Stations all had a thing to deal with called "Needle Time". ALL the Records played were given a precise time limit, for each day. This could not be exceeded. It was introduced by the demand of the Musician's Union, who demanded that their members should have live work. Radio was accused of playing records too much - thus cutting down the living for musicians playing live. The Unions controlled the BBC radio and TV and the BBC was powerless to do anything about it. Needle Time has now been done away with so the stations can play recorded music as much as they like. To get around the problem of not been able to play records, they had competitions, recipes, interviews, documentaries and of course the phone in. More popular on BBC local radio of course! Of course there was no restriction on live music, so that could be used. Needle Time probably made the radio a bit more interesting back then, for they couldn't just play records all the time. For example I suspect the Radio One Roadshows came out of the Needle Time thing. They could spend ages shouting to the crowd say at Blackpool "Hello Blackpool". And Dave Lee Travis wanting a stick of rock! Of course we know now that wasn't what he really wanted! But that's the nature of presenters.

As the only really national pop music station it was important. The only other being Luxemburg, which did have a reasonable audience. Radio One did suffer a disadvantage, due to the fact it was a AM station only as was the other. Whereas the ILR were all FM stereo as well as AM. Radio One was only stereo when it took over the radio two transmitter, for certain shows such as the chart and Saturday afternoon shows, with the USA charts. John Peel was lucky to also use the Radio Two FM band, as the night time transmission of AM was bad. The Radio One playlist was more important than it is now to record companies and the record company pluggers were out in force they day that records were to be chosen for that. Some Radio One DJ's have commented in their books that all sort of things went off to get them to play a record on the airwaves. But actually Radio One DJ's and the station itself were not good at picking the hits. In fact my local ILR station Radio Hallam was independently voted the top station for prediction of hits many years running. The station's programme director and former Pirate Radio DJ, Keith Skues regularly beat all the top DJ's at Radio One for picking the most hits and he was number one nearly all the time. In fact most of the top DJ's for that were Hallam presenters, nearly all beating the likes of Tony Blackburn.

Back in 1980 records were still being issued on a Friday and then Polydor decided to release the Jam's going underground on a Monday. The chart week was Monday to Saturday (no Sunday trading). So records released Friday got only two days of sales. However Saturday could see a great deal of stock fly out the shops. But records would tend to enter low and then climb. With the success of the Jam's Monday release more record labels started to issue records on a Monday, but the change over was slow. I suspect a lot of Record Shop owners were not certain when some records were being issued. Nevertheless records were still sent to Radio Stations and DJ's in clubs etc. These were marked Promo or had a large "A" on the label. You can still see these today on e-bay and some second hand shops. Some labels put the release date on them. CBS were very good at this, but others didn't. Capital Radio in London made up the top 40 they broadcast from records the station liked. Generally they included new records as soon as they had a copy and placed it in the chart. From looking at the release dates of these records, some only had a week of promo release, others were several months, though of course not every record on the top 40 of Capital made the top 50 BMRB or top 75. A much better way of breaking a dance act were the disco's in 1980, especially the Gay clubs. The Kelly Marie single was such a record. It was VERY popular in the North of England, especially Sheffield and Bradford, but was not down London way. The BMRB chart was only based on 250 shops, plus regional sales were played down. Otherwise the chart would have a high new entry from a Football record in one particular area, when it should only be say 90! Alan Jones in Record Mirror also reported that the Kelly Marie track was selling in the local sales charts of the ILR stations in Yorkshire. They did not make them up unlike Capital! The record company cottoned on to these sales and remarketed the record on another label and the sales took off. But Radio Airplay wasn't very affective at ensuring a hit. So there were two other ways to ensure a hit. The first was the format. Coloured discs, picture discs, different sleeves, 12" records and many more. Or you bought the manager of the shops a bottle of wine, free records, which they could then sell on to the public and many other ways. If that didn't work you went to the chart shops asked to see the BMRB diary and with a lot of persuasion the owner or shop assistant would let you have the BMRB diary and you could then fill it out! The Label employing the rep, would of course make certain their products stand out records selling more that the rest, but they were not stupid and made them look like they were genuine sales, by adding some ticks to another company's records. The practice was revealed by World In Action in the same year of 1980. Ironically Warner were the worst offenders of it. And what did they do about it? Appoint the boss of Warner as the chair of the BPI!

They tested OAOS when it first came out for everybody. Though it did work for some acts, most acts suffered from the result of it. It seems that Radio Airplay is just too useful a tool in the UK to ignore. The problem is that under OAOS a record will move up the charts slowly, unless you spend money marketing it's release. But since radio does not cost much, a build up of pre-orders is the result of the delayed release. New entry at one! Not 75!!! An entry at 75 will have the media saying "flop". Even the recent Five Seconds of Summer record was called a flop entering at 18! Radio people who pick the playlist are not democratic in the records that make the list. They rarely choose them on the sound, because most records are good! So the look for an excuse not to list a record. Entering the chart outside the top ten is a good excuse. When OAOS first came out Nicola Roberts (Girls Aloud) was trying to get a solo career going. But she couldn't get the airplay for her new song, because under the system it had gone in low on the charts. Radio people called it a flop and the fact she is not having hits now or making records is proof the OAOS is not good. Record companies are aware of who's releasing records, so they try to pick a week when a record might not pushed out by a massive single release from someone else. So after enough time to play the record on radio they get the record out. Recently records have been issued ahead of schedule due to the fact a crap cover version was selling too well.

The other labels might not have option to delay Gambo if what I am hearing turns out to be correct. Apparently the EU is passing a law that will make other download sites able to sell records to members of the public not registered in their country. This means that a record released in say Germany could be downloaded by someone from the UK. As the other European countries use OAOS then if you wanted the record, you could just switch to iTunes Germany and get it from there. Of course it might not be as simple as that, there is all the business of registering with the download site, unless iTunes for example make one registration available to all European sites. I suspect what might happen is that certain sites have "download imports". Just like the old record shops of the past, used to do, actually they still do, those that are left! Of course this all depends if the EU will pass the law. It will be very complicated, since tax would be much harder to collect from consumers going to outside places to download. It will be very interesting to see what happens if the other EU sites sell downloads cheaper than 99p.

I think you have misinterpreted my comment about the future. What I was implying is the next logical step in the development of streaming isn't going to be that streaming might become the norm. As I said earlier people thought downloading would be the norm. Some kind of technological breakthrough might mean that streaming isn't needed anymore, just like downloads. A whole sequence of events could happen that could put a nail in streaming's coffin. Some of these things won't even be connected to the music industry at all. Another example of the future not going as planned... At the moment Microsoft for example are looking great with the free windows 10. But what happens if when it comes out the computer nerds hate it! That could mean the end of Microsoft in a few weeks! You never no with history. Your other statement implies that the music biz is working for the collective good of each other. That's complete bullshit! If Apple can get one over on Spotify they will. Since Apple want you to pay big time for streaming then, that will end the free service and I think the public will then look for something else to put their money in, leaving streaming with only say a small part of the music bizz. When Apple brought out it's ipod they made certain other companies couldn't use it. That doesn't sound like some business being nice about the development of new projects.