Being relevant is tough, remaining relevant is even tougher. It requires you to put into question your own work and your own input. Unofficial websites like Mediatraffic, as well as official ones including the British Official Charts Company, have been slowly but surely losing relevancy due to their struggle in admitting their past mistakes. At Chartmasters.org, our inflexible objective of highlighting accuracy results into this article that will be fixing every past figure as soon as new information proving a flaw is available.
How will we do that? For which case? Where can you find all the new fixing updates? Well, all those questions are going to be answered in this short article which will ultimately be the home for all updates.
update streaming formula
Hi djdj!
It’s in the pipe, I’m still looking for potential optimizations then I’ll update this article 🙂
MJ I don’t think the streaming change works. Because I think people stream more on Spotify than other services. Like for example Ariana has like 12B Spotify streams and only 3B AM streams. Likewise with Rihanna who has 14-15B Spotify streams and only 2B AM streams. Even rap artists like Cardi B have around 3x as many Spotify streams as AM. Isn’t there some way you can just estimate actual AM and other streaming info (based on news articles)instead of just multiplying Spotify? Also some users are more dominant on other services which wouldn’t be showcased. Like basically it feels… Read more »
Hi Ash! Your comment is true for US / UK markets, when we live there we tend to think about Spotify / Apple Music when we think about streaming. At times we remember about Amazon and Tidal. There is a lot of local platforms that are fairly big yet. Deezer, Gaana, Anghami, Joox, Saavn, QQ, Kugou, AWA, to name a few from the top of my head. Of course, knowing data for these platforms would be better than multiplying Spotify streams with market statistics. Then, the feasability is more than doubtful. Most of them display no data at all, so… Read more »
That’s true. But these platforms are mainly dominated by local acts as well. The best performing acts in Korean streaming services tend to be kpop acts. Likewise with chinese acts or kpop groups with Chinese members in China and so on. Like once India started having more people on YouTube it became obvious that they tend to mainly listen to Indian music. But by multiplying Spotify we make it seem as though western artists that dominate Spotify would dominate those services in the same way. Which is simply not true. There might be some exceptions which I’m sure you will… Read more »
No doubt local platforms are dominated by local artists Ash! The pattern is clear, but they all add to some which while lower than local artists is significant in comparison to Spotify streams. I don’t want to spoil a few new articles that will come out soon but there will be evidences of that shared soon. The thing to keep in mind is that our ratio uses IFPI data, we factor numbers by 272 million (streaming users) divided by 157 million (Spotify users). That means 115 million users are extrapolated. QQ Music alone has more! Gaana is close to that… Read more »
Grate job. Grate analysis
Hi guys!
I don’t remember when Spotify started to count streams, song by song
Hi Luca!
Well, pretty much from the start, their beta version was launched in 2008. Numbers remained low until recently though. To give you an example, Bohemian Rhapsody topped 500 million streams recently, I had noted down its streams in July 2014: they were on 41 million up to that date!
Hi Al!!
I know that your favourite artists are The Beatles, I would like to know if you will soon update them with You Tube updates and with these New streaming formula.
Hey MJ, any thoughts yet on adding QQ music, netease and other chinese sites?
It seems clear they’ve become incorporated into IFPI due to taylor’s big increase this year.
If you’re refering to Reputation’s sales, Chinese sites are not the reason for her increase. The reason is simply that the album got overshipped. Those numbers on QQ are not album sales to begin with neither.
Video streams from QQ are actually shown though, so in theory these numbers could be added. But I have no idea what ratio to put them on and it would all in all overcomplicate things I think.
Wait Taylor Swift was the only artist that overshipped in the 2017 IFPI list? How did they let her do that? Isn’t that an unfair practice considering it can artificially inflate their rankings and make other artists do. Yeah I was referring to QQ and netease, i think there are 3 others also that form the big 5 sites. But Taylor also sold alot of actual albums in China, which is what I was referring to, like she did 300k first week in china. There aren’t really video streams either on QQ at least, it’s a downloading site tbh. Albums… Read more »
MJD stated this about QQ a while ago:
“those are not sales. In fact, you can pay to download an album, but nobody does that on y.qq. This is a streaming service, on which you can pay an extra fee per month – $2.18 instead of $1.16 – to also download anything you want. Thus, those are not paid downloads, it is equivalent to Spotify users putting in local some songs”
The same goes for these other sites as well.
And yes, you can stream videos on QQ! Here are Swift’s videos and numbers for instance.
Taylor was definitely not the only one, Eminem sold nowhere near that much too! It is important to understand that it isn’t a choice by the label to overship an album. They barely ship albums that got ordered to them by retailers. These retailers bought too many copies, believing they would do wonders at Christmas. Now that they realized most of these copies are never going to be sold, they will return them to labels. I’ll do additional checks to see if we can extract something from QQ, but I already did part of that job some months ago so… Read more »
Hi Jake!
The figure of Taylor is due to overshipment. QQ Music isn’t sales as quoted by Al, elseway Katy Perry and tons of Chinese acts would be there too!
Hi MJD!!
I would like to know if new streaming formula will be applied to artists already studied such as Queen,Pink Floyd or AC/DC in wich there will be updates and if the result of their sales will change much as in the case of big streaming sellers for example Drake or Rihanna.
I hope that you answer me.
Hi IRIS!
The new formula will be applied to new articles, even if they are updates. It was the situation as of the end of 2017, since the market continues to increase we can use this new formula as there is more streams achieved now that previously.
Hello MJD !!
I have a question for you ! I think that only official videos of a singer or VEVO videos should be counted, because many YouTube users delete their video clips(songs) from their favorite artists and then lose sales / views for some singers or groups.
I hope you will answer, I am curious about your opinion.
As much as I like to see some of my favourite artists’ totals increasing from this new update of digital downloads and ringtones weighting, I think this is more of an inflation. Don’t get me wrong, I truly respect MJD’s hard work and dedication for updating his formula and keeping his analysis as relevant as possible, but with this new formula, a lot of new acts or acts with huge download sales are gonna benefit a LOT with this (eg. Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Bruno Mars etc.) Their albums will have big increases and will match lots of… Read more »
Hi Raffi! In reality it is quite the opposite – I changed this weighting more for downloads than for ringtones. The technical point of view is relevant, but not as much as the functional point of view. As shown by figures, 6 downloads replaced 1 album sales, so the 1:10 ratio was an issue. You see it as an inflation because we have been used to see those low figures for many years, it doesn’t make them valid though! In reality, it is the 1:10 weighting which is a true deflation of 00s blockbuster albums. For example, without getting into… Read more »
What’s on page 9 and page 10 isn’t digital song sales though.
Page 9 is George Michael losing physical single sales. Just like Britney when she went from 96.9M to 95,8M, she lost around 4M physical single sales.
Page 10 is Coldplay losing album sales. Like raffi said, everyone is going to benefit from this, whether it’s a big increase (Rihanna) or a small increase (Janet).