safe

4y

Might have to look into it

deadacc

4y

that drake s***

Zero

4y

you taking this site to the next level

maruchinn

4y

Sheeran has never sold more than 450k. only artists that can hit 500k + are Drake (we'll see if it still applies this year), Swift and maybe K. Dot

safe

4y

huh yea u right interesting

Adele as well ofc but she never drops

maruchinn

4y

adding to that i think Travis could maybe hit 500k with his next effort and maybe The Weeknd could've done 500k if it weren't for the covid s***

safe

4y

astro actually did over 500k but yea it'll be borderline given the new bundle rules
and Agree w The Weeknd streaming was down like 20% that week or something

OVHoe Freight

4y

I honestly don’t think the new bundles rules do anything really. Every artist I’ve seen just hides and buries the non-bundled merch on their site

PushaToThe

4y

Need them to get rid of air play since it's fake anyway

safe

4y

I think the redeeming probably makes a pretty big difference

dood

4y

Yeah they changed the alghorithim a lot. They censored blacklivesmatter for a bit (after saying it was a """""bug""""") and basically made it to where if you're not conventionally attractive you're not gonna be on the for you page due to """""bullying problems"""", which sucks cause a lot of the "ugly" creators was what made it have some charm since it was essentially vine 2, and they were the ones driving the unconventional music around.

I'd give tiktok another couple of years till it's gone, but on the bright side soundcloud is having a resurgance. Don't wanna derail the thread here and i'll probably wait till you make one but there's a scene brewing underground wise. S***s crazy

safe

4y

This is gonna be split into two parts. First is an objective look at how the charts work. What counts towards sales and chart position of albums and singles and what doesn’t. The second part is going to be a look at how labels work the rules to ‘manipulate’ the charts in their favor. While the second part is also evidence-based, it is worth noting that explicit proof of label tactics is hard to come by – it’s often legally a grey area and as a result you won’t see labels admitting to it.

In terms of singles, this thread is only going to focus on the Billboard Hot 100. This is far and away the industry standard chart for singles – if you hear about an artist getting a #1 song, they will always be referring to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The Hot 100 is released weekly on Tuesday US time. The modern Hot 100 is made up of three metrics for a song’s success – Streams, Sales and Airplay. The Hot 100 tracks streams from streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music as well as services like YouTube. It tracks sales from platforms such as iTunes and from sales via other sources such as the artist’s website. Airplay refers to radio impressions – the number of people hearing the song via radio. The chart tracks streams and sales from Thursday midnight each week. This is why you see songs release on Thursdays at midnight – it allows them to get a full week of streams and sales giving it a higher chart position. Airplay is measured from Monday to Sunday. For the most part the difference in weeks has no difference however recently Toosie Slide charted on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 because of the three days of airplay it received for the Billboard week prior to its release week.

The formula for the Hot 100 is not public knowledge and changes at least once per year. Currently streams are split into three categories – paid, programmed and ad supported. Paid are weighted at 1, ad supported at 2/3 and programmed at ½. This reduces the impact of streams on platforms like YouTube. Streaming has the largest relative impact on the charts at the moment followed by Airplay and then sales. Specifically, to calculate generally on a weekly basis a commonly used formula for projections is
Sales/5 + Paid streams/1250 + Free streams/1875 + Programmed Streams/2500 + Airplay/6000

For a #1 song this will usually be in the high 30,000s to low 40,000s. There are several places that do chart projections during the week – two to watch for are @​talkofthecharts and @​simonfalk on Twitter.

50/20 – if a song has charted on the Hot 100 for 20 weeks or more and charts below #50 for any week after the 20th, it will be removed from the chart.

25/52 – if a song has charted on the hot 100 for 52 weeks or more and charts below #25 for any week after the 52nd, it will be removed from the chart.

For both 50/20 and 25/52 the song can re-enter the chart if it has a significant gain in points for an identifiable reason. This is reviewed on a case-by-case basis by Billboard so there’s not really any objectivity to re-entering. Things that can typically cause re-entry are artist deaths, Christmas or major events relating to an artist or a song.

Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas re-enters in the weeks leading up to Christmas every year

Remixes – any remixes of a song count towards the song’s chart position. However, the version with the largest proportion is the version that gets credited. For example: The Hills was #1 and a version with Eminem released. This remix helped keep The Hills at #1 but because the remix did not make up a larger proportion of points than the original song, the remix is not credited on the chart. Similarly Say So remix with Nicki Minaj was released. This remix did make up a larger proportion of points so as a result for the Hot 100 following the remixes release Say So was changed to Say So (remix) and Nicki Minaj was credited.

Sales – only four copies of a song sold per credit card are counted towards a chart position.