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Top of the Charts – Which Charts to be Exact?

Due to the abundance of different ways music fans today can listen to music, the days of one song dominating the charts have sadly come to an end.

Every summer there is always that one song which becomes the sound of the season. That number one hit that gets spin after spin across national radio, that everyone has learned the words to before the season is out. That number one song which was fairly easy to identify back in the days when major labels and radio programmers actually called the shots and chose to crown one or two lucky hits.

In 2012 it was Carley Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”, In 2002 it was Nelly’s “Hot in Here”, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” in 1983 and so on.

So, what was the biggest song of this past summer?

Surely, we should be able look back over the ratings and find which song performed the best over a selected period of time. But, thanks to the dizzying buffet of ways that music finds listeners today, it is impossible to actually narrow down a clear winner.

A recent US study, carried out by Rolling Stone, looked at three different listening platforms to see how the most popular songs stacked up via different listening methods. And although this was a study carried out in the US its results are still relevant when applied to music listening around different parts of the world.

The three platform’s that were selected for this study were, iHeartRadio, representing broadcast radio play, Spotify, representing music streaming and YouTube, representing video streaming, respectively. It is important to note that iHeart tracks were tallied by total audience spins on the company’s stations, while the latter two platforms were counted by individual, on-demand streams – already we can see how the results may be different when comparing these platforms.

Without diving too deeply into the results of this study, as it is not the main focus here, we can clearly see that the top rated songs have performed differently between radio and streaming services:

“From May to August, the clear winners across terrestrial radio stations in the U.S. would have been pop tracks like Post Malone’s “Psycho,” Zedd’s “The Middle” and Taylor Swift’s “Delicate,” according to spin counts provided to Rolling Stone by iHeartRadio. But over on streaming services, according to data provided by Spotify and YouTube, fresher crowd-pleasers from Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion and Cardi B reigned supreme.”

Much of the difference here comes down to the audience of digital streaming services, who tend to browse through new music and bump promising hits to the top very quickly. The listening habits of this audience is already different straight off the bat, which results in a large knock on effect, effecting a song’s overall performance.

Meanwhile, while AM/FM radio remains the most popular way that Americans of all ages listen to music — 93 percent of adult’s still tune in at least once a week, according to stats from Nielsen — the format, by nature, takes a while to catch up on trends.

Many regional and local station managers will say they’re hesitant to put a track into rotation unless it’s already proven its appeal with a broad audience, which results in a three-to-six-month delay from when the song first starts spiking the music world’s attention. Going by this logic, it would suggest that a song of the summer won’t really hit its peak in popularity until the summer season has actually ended, or the song was released way before summer began. Either way, this can make it incredibly difficult to judge fairly.

On top of this issue, another problem is due to the fact that there’s also simply too much new music now — all the time. Music streaming has jump-started the pace of recording, producing and releasing. The constant flow of new tracks makes it hard to say which song was truly “number one” over any given period, even within a single streaming service.

Also not to be forgotten, are all the songs that stack up digital plays and views because of reasons outside of the music itself. Take Drake’s “In My Feelings,” for instance, which racked up over 171 million U.S. Spotify streams largely off the backs of viral online memes. Yes, memes! It didn’t crack the Top 10 on iHeart’s stations. So, if you’re someone who listens to music only via the radio, you might have totally missed how dominant the song was in the millennial leagues.

But despite all of this, what about the charts, which surely can give a definitive answer? Sadly, we can’t look to their numbers to settle the debate either. Because music charts nowadays compare streaming numbers against traditional album sales — to a somewhat arbitrary rate of 1,500 streams equalling one album purchase, which is made even murkier by some chart-makers deciding to weigh paid streams more than free streams — which doesn’t reveal popularity so much as game ability. (Anyone can essentially hack their way to number one with the right release strategy or enough fanbase enthusiasm.)

As a result of the old days’ simple record-store sales ledger being replaced by all sorts of numbers sprouting out from dozens of sites and platforms, music fans can’t say with confidence that any specific song won over the summer of 2018 — because it now entirely depends on who is measuring it.

On music-makers’ side, this can come as both a blessing and a curse. There are now more chances to get to number one, but it also takes more effort to stand out from the crowd. With decisions needing to be made on which listening medium you want to be heard most on, and by which age demographic, an artist’s ‘plan’ of getting their song out there has now become an equation with many variables – who do I want hearing this, where do I want them hearing this, when do I want it heard, and so on. An equation that, if solved correctly, could produce a number one hit.

Of course, if you’re someone as big as Drake though, who saw four different tracks lodge into the top ten of iHeart radio stations, Spotify and YouTube this summer — you can use the fragmentation to your advantage.

Content and survey data courtesy of Rolling Stone.

Read original article here.