New Chart Rules

At the beginning of July the rules changed yet again for the UK Singles Chart. Without going into too much detail, mainly because of the complexity of them, the most notable changes are YouTube views now count and a stream from a free user is down weighted more than a stream from a premium user.

The singles chart has been seen by many as meaningless for many years now and these latest rules certainly don't do them many favours, but we shouldn't forget than we've always had to take the charts with a pinch of salt.

On new years eve 1999 Radio 1 (I think) were doing their countdown of the best songs of the millennium. At number 3 was "Angels" by Robbie Williams, number 2 was "Unfinished Sympathy" by Massive Attack and number 1 was "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. All three songs had something notable in common, none of them managed to get to number one. In fact "Unfinished Sympathy" never even made the top ten.

Take a band like the Doors, a band with many well known songs but perhaps their best known song "Light My Fire" failed to reach the Top 40 in the 60s. It did reach the top ten when rereleased in 1991, but their only other hits we "Hello I Love You" which made number 15 and "Riders on the Storm" which made 22.

I could list a few hugely successful bands which have a poor singles chart record. The reality is from a personal perspective I have never bought any singles from many of my favourite acts, partly because I had the albums.

Price was also a factor even with singles. If you could buy two singles at £2.99 each or one single at £5.99, what would you do? and yes I did see some CD singles costing that much several years ago.

Obviously times have changed and there isn't a perfect way to measure the charts. Using YouTube though is quite baffling really. A few years ago I went through a phase of listening to new entries in the charts I didn't know on YouTube. Most of them were crap, but under the latest rules they would count towards the chart. In fact my Top of the Pops posts would also contribute to the charts.

It's the down weighting of streams though that I find really stupid. We are trying to measure the popularity of a song, so why should a song be deemed less popular just because most of it's fan base are free users. It could mean that the most streamed song of the week isn't even in the Top 40 if it's predominantly streamed by free users.

Now we're a month into these new rules, how has this effected the charts so far? Well the number one record at the time of writing is Drake, that pretty much says it all.