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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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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