Mirai

I find it hard to believe too but so far this is what has been replied each time someone's been asking this question on another forum (in French, called Charts In France). I wanted to add a link to an article that was posted on a serious website dealing with the music business but it's not working since I am under 20 messages posted here so far. While this article doesn't provide any clear solution to the singles chart issue, it seems to hint that it is not impossible to determine whether a song gets played as part of an album or individually... I'm getting confused now! (the article can be found on the musically.com website, in the news section, it was posted on March 13th)

It's not technically possible for the moment apparently... But it hope it does become possible soon though. This might very well be the only viable solution to try and save the singles chart as we've always known them.

Hey guys! I'm new here so please be nice :) I've always been a chart and music industry stats lover, and the UK charts have always been the ones I'm most interested in. I've decided to start posting because I really wanna put my 2 cents in the current debate about how streaming influences the charts and what's happening with Ed Sheeran's ultra dominance of the charts at the moment. So, first of all, I've always been against the idea of non-single songs being allowed to chart in the singles chart, and that was way before streaming even existed. In the digital download era, seeing album-only songs charting within the singles chart or chart before their official release as singles always made me cringe. But it usually wasn't a big deal. Then streaming emerged, and it has now almost replaced digital downloads completely... While I'm totally for its inclusion on the charts, what's happening with Ed Sheeran's new album right now is just so ridiculous that I felt the need to voice my opinion on what I've always considered as a problem. I'll go straight to the point: I have nothing against Ed Sheeran, but I hate seeing his whole album charting in the Top20. If it had some sort of logic, I guess I'd just have to deal with it. But to me, the situation is totally illogical and has been ever since streaming was officially included in the charts with the wrong rules. I mean, my concern is the double-counting of streams, one stream being counted both in the singles and in the albums chart. The thing is, that has been inflating sales artificially for too long already, and Divide's case has just highlighted how big the mistake can be: officially speaking, Divide sold 79.000 copies through streaming equivalence. Except that most of the streams generating those 79.000 album sales equivalent were also responsible for all of the songs from the album charting in the singles' Top20. Not to mention that those 79.000 sales represent more than 10% of the album's total first week sales... So either those 10%+ sales of Divide or 80-90% of its "non-single" album songs sales are artificial, depending on which point of view you chose... That's a big mistake to me, knowing that this has been happening every week for every album from every artist ever since streaming was included in the albums charts and sales count (and the bigger you are on streaming platforms, the more your official sales figures are artificially inflated due to double-counting). That is ridiculous in itself and shows how the OCC definitely do have to do something so that streaming stops being over-represented in the charts due to rules that were not thought out well enough. I've read this whole topic, plus articles and other stuff, and I've got a few different suggestions to make to solve this problem... 1) the OCC could decide to stop counting streaming in the albums chart and only count physical albums or full album downloads as album sales. That would mean Divide would have sold around 595,000 copies instead of around 675,000. In that case, all streams would only could as individual songs sales, and that would make it logical that Ed Sheeran's songs occupied almost the whole Top20 on the week of release. But at least, there wouldn't be double-counting anymore and the figures would be 100% accurate. On the other side, the singles chart would look rather pointless each time a massive album is released, with all the songs from it flooding the singles chart, just like it's happening right now... 2) do it the other way around and define strict rules as to what is a single and what is an album song or force labels to differenciate singles and album-only songs. This way, the streams of a song considered as a single would count in the singles chart, while the streams of an album song would only count as part of an album's sales. That's somehow how I read the rule the OCC put in place when they decided that for albums the Top2 songs should have their streams weighted down to the average streams per song on the album. Except that to me this rule should have not only been applied to the Top2 songs but to all the songs promoted as singles. And also, there should have been a similar rule for the singles chart: the streams of a song that are already counted in the albums chart should be deducted for the streams counted for the singles' sales. 3) if we take Divide as an example, then it seems right to assume that most of the streams of most of the songs on the album were generated by people listening to the whole album or most of the album. So, the OCC could decide to take an album-oriented approach and consider that the streams of the least popular track on the album represent roughly how many times the album has been listened to as a whole, and count this in the album charts. Then, for all the other songs on the album, the streams above the total streams of the least popular track on the album would be counted in the singles chart. I would even go as far as to suggest that not only the least popular track should be used as a reference to define whole-album streams but maybe also the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even 5th least popular songs. And for all the other songs, their streams which are above those "core albums songs" streams could be counted in the singles chart... 4) I would hate that, but they could also put an end to the albums chart and allocate one sale per song when someone buys a physical or digital album. But this week we would have found ourselves with the 16 tracks of Divide selling at least 595,000 copies each :lol: This chart would then become rather pointless and totally boring to watch, IMO... To me, option 2 is the best one, as it would preserve both the singles and the albums chart as they've always existed while measuring sales/popularity of official singles and albums more accurately. But option 3 is certainly the most feasable one since it would not require cooperation from the music labels. On a side note, I would also suggest the OCC changes the ratio applied when converting an album's streams into sales. It should be proportional to the number of songs actually present on the album. Because the current rule pushes labels to release albums with more and more songs in order to inflate "streaming sales" artificially. Indeed, if the ratio is "total number of streams / 1000", then it's easy for labels to release albums containing 15+ songs so that there are more streams converted into sales. You can clearly see the pattern already: while albums used to have only like 12 songs on average a few years ago, it's more like 15 or more nowadays. I'd suggest there should be a rule of like 100 (or 150) per song present on an album instead. So that if an album has 18 tracks, it requires 1800 (or 2700) streams of all of the songs on an album to count it as one album sale. And for an album only having 12 songs, it would require 1200 (or 1800) streams. That would make it more fair for every album. Oh and finally, while I do agree that streaming platforms playlists do influence the charts in a bad way, at the moment I don't think it is technically possible to distinguish streams coming from people actively listening to a song from streams coming from passive listening... But in any case, I think we've never been so close to having charts reflecting exactly what's popular among music lovers. In the past, we used to have multiple editions of singles/albums to inflate the sales (the Japanese market is still hugely biased with this today, more than any other market), hardcore fans making multiple purchases of a record to support their favourite artists, marketing strategies to maximize first week sales (chosing the release date carefully, releasing a single long after it's been sent to radios, having huge discounts for singles bought on their first week, etc...) and etc... So the charts have always been a bit biased and manipulated by music labels strategies to some extent. But I honestly think that it's much harder to cheat now with streaming than it used to be with physical records and even digital ones. Plus, when someone listens to a Spotify playlist, they can still skip the songs they don't like can't they? So while some of them might be totally passive and not care, I wanna believe that there are also lots of listeners who still play an active role such as putting their favs on repeat and skipping those they don't like or don't want to listen to most of the time. What do you guys think? What I just explained is pretty technical and I'm not sure I made it easy to understand... Let me know if I'm not clear enough!