I see songs move up and down charts on Spotify and iTunes. But then every once in awhile a song will just appear in the number one spot seemingly on the same day it came out. How are they measuring this? Are people really streaming it enough to get it there right away or is there another metric that I’m missing?
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It’s kind of complicated and they keep some of it to themselves so people can’t game the charts. But they have to balance a few factors:
* Which songs have been streamed the most over all time?
* Which songs have been streamed the most recently?
* Which songs are being streamed the most *right now*?
For example, a song by an old group like The Beatles has probably been streamed more than a single released yesterday. That just makes sense. It doesn’t mean those songs are “hotter” right now because we’re looking at years of accumulated data and the new song isn’t that old. It also makes us wonder if saying, “A lot of people are listening to The Beatles today” means anything because it’s likely a lot of people listen to them *every* day.
So even if 100,000 people are streaming a Beatles song right now, if 2,000,000 people streamed a new song this week it makes sense to sort that new song higher. They chose to listen to that instead of old things they already like. There’s something to it.
But that 2,000,000 plays this week song? What if only 60,000 people are listening to it right now but a single that just released today has 800,000 streams in the last 10 minutes? That’s HOT, people want it really badly, so it sorts upwards. If people are listening to it 5 or 6 times in a row, they’re not listening to other music, so there must be something to it.
So they look at all three of those things to sort out the charts. Some mix of “How hot is it right now?” vs. “How hot is it over some recent time periods?” helps balance things out.
Maybe that new single got 2,000,000 views in one day, but then people decided it wasn’t good and went back to listening to last week’s tracks. That’d cause a big drop in the “listening right now” numbers and make it fall faster. So new songs get judged not by their “over the last week” performance and get judged by how excited people seem to be to listen to it over any other music. Once they’re a few days old, it’s more about how many total streams they’ve had.
It’s a little unfair in favor of new music, but in general it’s true that new tracks are more likely to chart than old ones. When an old one climbs, it’s usually because either there’s no new content coming out or the new stuff is bad and it caused people to look into older stuff for something they missed.
the first week is actually often where songs peak, because bands and artists usually drum up hype for the release ahead of time, and even if they don’t, as long as they’re big enough, people will immediately want to hear the new release as soon as it’s out. as time wears on, between getting a little sick of it, people who listened to it once or twice because it was new but didn’t grow attached, and new songs coming out to listen to, these songs will fall on the charts a bit. but lots of people listen to a song they end up loving especially often when they first hear it, and the first week is a time when *everyone* who hears it is hearing it for the first time
Not sure how they do it now in the age of streaming/streaming charts other than I assume they have an algorithm that tracks the number of plays in a certain time period and mixes it with expected hype and search hits, popularity of artist etc.
Before streaming music charts were similar to book charts – the figures were based on pre-sales ordered by resellers (stores), not direct sales to consumers.
So John Grisham has a new book coming out, the book store expects it to sell well, so they order 100 copies instead of 5 like they would for other books. It arrives on shelves, but before anyone can actually buy a copy it’s already number 1 best-seller on the charts. If it then stays at number one you know people are actually buying it – but if it drops quickly down the charts you know that it was over-inflated. That’s how a book debuts at number one.
It’s very similar to how music charts were – how many pre-orders by record stores? But music charts also had the additional info of how many radio stations are requesting the rights to play the song, and how often are they requesting to play it per hour or day? So a song or album can debut at number 1 if the record store has pre-ordered a lot of stock to sell and the radio stations are requesting and willing to pay for a lot of “spins”. If sales and requests stay high it stays on the charts, but if after the first week no one wants to sell or play the music anymore it drops quickly out of the charts.
How do radio stations and record stores “know” which songs will be hits in advance? They don’t, really. There’s a bit of guesswork (some is easy enough to predict if an artist is already established and has already had multiple hits) but it’s mostly the companies that produce or manage the artists and music telling them in advance that they expect a song/album to be a big hit and they should order a lot of stock/play it a lot.
What they are really saying is “hey, we’re going to heavily promote and market this artist/song because we believe it will be a hit”, and usually heavy promotion or marketing correlates with high sales, so stores and radio stations have no reason not to do it.
Where this can be gamed, though, and what has happened many times in the past as well as now, is someone will artificially inflate their debut chart position by offering a lot of first week sales/plays at a discount. “If you order 10 copies in the first week of the new John Grisham novel we will charge you full wholesale price for each copy, but if you order 100 in the first week we will give them to you for free”, or “We will actually pay YOU to play our song heavily in the first 24/48 hours after release”.
For more, see [Payola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola).
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