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?
In: Technology
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.
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