Streaming is a measure of a person’s available listening time, which concentrates the vote into the hands of a certain group who love playing the same tracks over and over. What’s different now is that the dominance of streaming rewards passivity – repeat listening – rather than active discovery. The system of compiling the chart from a small number of “chart return” record shops meant it was easy to game the Top 40 by sending people in to buy particular singles in bulk. The UK Top 40 has never been a pure reflection of an artist’s success – in the 1990s, labels took advantage of formatting rules by releasing singles in multiple versions to encourage the diehard fans to buy them all previously there had been badges and picture discs and all the gimmicks designed to give one single an edge over the other. But it’s also terrible PR – proof, if it were needed, that the charts are now, essentially, meaningless. You can see why they wouldn’t: the overwhelming success of a British act is great PR for an organisation that’s dwindled in relevance next to YouTube and Spotify, with their more immediate metrics of plays and stats. And you shouldn’t change rules for extreme cases.” In contrast, ÷ has generated 79,000 album streams.

As a result, Stormzy’s album ended up with one track in the Top 20 and seven tracks in the Top 40. The highest number of streams for any album before was Stormzy last week, which achieved 21,000 album streams, then a record for a No 1 album. “But we shouldn’t (and won’t) rush to any kneejerk actions. “We will review chart methodologies (as we continually do) to see if there is something we could or should change,” he says. I asked OCC chief executive Martin Talbot if Sheeran’s chart domination would induce another shift. This January, the OCC announced that the figure had almost doubled to 80%, and that it was changing its rules, though not significantly: you now needed 150 streams to count as one unit.

In 2014, the format accounted for just 41.5% of the overall singles market, at a time when 100 streams were the equivalent of one “sale”. (Incidentally, Sheeran’s single Thinking Out Loud was the first streaming-abetted No 1.) The Official Charts Company underestimated the huge effect the change would have. According to BBC figures, in the first six months of 2016, there were 86 new entries in the UK singles chart, compared with 230 a decade earlier. Since the introduction of streaming in June 2014, the charts have become granular and stagnant, with fewer new acts breaking through. And you shouldn’t change rules for extreme cases Martin Talbot, Official Charts CompanyĮd Sheeran’s total chart domination this week – all 16 songs on his album ÷ are in the Top 20 singles, and all of his three albums are in the Top 5 albums – will be the first time in years, save the odd Christmas chart battle, that most of us have had a clue what’s going on in the Top 40. Source for the collation of the 2013-2016 weekly charts is its associated song pages.Most music fans had a point at which the charts ceased to be a key reference point for music – mine was around 2002 – but since the demise of Top of the Pops in 2006 and the introduction of streaming, there have been fewer and fewer reasons for anyone to jump on in the first place.

However, if you don’t want to spare the trouble of scrolling through that site and only want the highlights of the Spotify charts daily, you can find exactly that on my Twitter. The link to the site can also be found below, directed to the most recent chart.

Lower positions are passed for now due to time constraints, but may be collated in a future update.Īfter the last week of 2016, the weekly charts live on on an official site published by Spotify, and alongside the newly introduced daily chart feature, is currently where the charts from 2017 up to this day can be found with ease. Hence, by collating every song’s chart track week after week, the weekly charts have been somewhat reproduced, unfortunately only to the top 20. These early charts dating up to late 2016 cannot be found online currently however, except in scattered form on ‘s expansive Spotify song archives, showing a song’s chart performance over time instead of archiving the weekly charts themselves. Below are the links to the Spotify charts from the chart dated April 28, 2013, notably the first time the country-specific Singapore weekly chart was published, after Spotify was officially released in Singapore on April 16, 2013.

Spotify charts 2017 songs