5 major changes at ChartMasters
During the last few days and weeks, we added several great new enhancements to the ChartMasters.org ecosystem.
You possibly noticed some of them, others most likely not as they were added today. Which one of these 5 new additions will you like the most?
1 – CSPC: Voting System
It has been a debate and a hot question for many years: who will be the next artist to be treated with our CSPC series?
Our feeling has always been divided between completing the strongest sellers and using a more democratic way, asking you your opinion.
We are now setting up a system that brings advantages of both ways: a voting system based on a predefined list of deserving artists, with a weighting for the expected top sellers.
Depending on your subscription, you will be able to assign from 3 to 100 points to 1 to 10 artists, spread the way you want. You can vote for artists from a list of 135 stars meeting a specific sales criteria.
This includes artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to 2Pac to EXO to Iron Maiden.
As soon as a CSPC article will be published, the leader of the voting system will automatically be the next pick. This also ensures more visibility to our upcoming works.
You can vote here, while the leaderboard is available at this page. Both links are added under the menu section Other Useful Links.
2 – CSPC: QQ views replace Xiami streams
In less than a fortnight, a couple of events pushed us to change our CSPC formula for Chinese streams.
Previously, we used Xiami streams, extrapolating them with their market share of 6.5 to 125.
The Xiami platform, which was losing steam lately, has now been shut down for controversial reasons.
Almost at the same time, as part of our current works to automatize as many elements as possible, we have set up an API to retrieve QQ streams.
While QQ audio streams aren’t entirely exploitable – only streams as part of parent albums are available – video views are.
After testing the formula on various major artists in this market, we have set the Chinese streams at QQ video views * 50 for songs available on audio streams, and QQ video views * 5 for songs which can’t be streamed in audio form as they are pay-only titles.
This gives a reflection of the country’s streams, which are then converted into album sales as before, with a 11,750 to 1 ratio.
3 – Spotify tools: artists global impact
While the Spotify software displays only artists’ top 5 cities in terms of listeners, our API is able to retrieve their Top 50. We are now sharing a page to see every artists’ top cities.
This goes deep enough to distinguish artists with an impact limited to some countries and artists who are popular all over the world.
We’ve added a small but key indicator: the number of distinct countries represented by these 50 cities.
Nearly all artists impact from 2 to 30 countries. From 2 to 25, the highest is the number, the most global is an artist.
Artists with more than 25 countries are often the ones with less impact in the US, which ultimately make them look bigger elsewhere.
In this tool you can search for anyone you want. The page also provides a few more indicators like the global ranking, the popularity rating, monthly listeners and the delta from last month’s monthly listeners.
We may set up a clever system in the near future to give a true global impact rating, which weights artists’ results per city with their number of users, considers the sheer amount of streams on top of relative results, etc.
4 – Spotify tools: top 2021 albums
For nearly a year we have been following the success stories of the Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Dua Lipa, Pop Smoke, BTS, and more, through our page listing the most streamed 2020 albums.
The page includes both the ranking of albums as well as song by song breakdowns for each album.
We renew the experience this year with the 2021 class. Already 11 albums are over 240 million streams.
With next week’s album release of Justin Bieber and the highly anticipated Drake effort poised to come out soon, we will no doubt enjoy looking at daily growths again!
5 – Spotify tools: most streamed songs of all-time
Online for a few weeks, we have also made available the list of most-streamed songs of all-time on Spotify.
More popular is a song, higher are chances that it gets exploited a lot through several remixes, including hyped ones.
It means rankings which focus in one track only, as it is done in this Wikipedia page, make little sense.
That’s why we created this page which aggregates all versions with distinct playcounts of the same song.
It draws a picture fairly different and way more accurate than lists we are used to see.
Right now both Dance Monkey and Blinding Lights are climbing up the ladder in great fashion.
Stay in touch!
We do not always write blog posts to communicate on new enhancements so make sure to follow us on twitter to get the latest news immediately!
Is Youtube plataform considered for data and popularity index by Chartmasters? Thank you
Great news
Still using a bogus /11750 to calculate sales from China with “revenue” in mind, but I don’t see you adjusting your formula to account for free Spotify streams, or reducing the weight of cheap South Korea singles, or weighting vinyl sales higher because they cost plenty more than a traditional album, I guess nothing has really changed…
Hi Tommy! Why would it be bogus? The whole thing is different in China, not only the price. Streaming platforms aren’t streaming platforms, they are social networks, the usage isn’t the same at all. Views are not controlled as elsewhere, I can set up a batch hitting a stream every 5 seconds in a minute or 2 and that would bring tones of streams to the song in no time. A bit like how Melon numbers made no sense when they were shared. It’s also similar with YouTube views and its usage in India. We can’t act as if a… Read more »
I just want to congratulate MJD and the entire Chartmasters team. You’re site is incredible and weirdly addictive, so thank you for all your great work
Why are pay-only songs on QQ only given a 10x smaller multiplier than free tier songs? Paying users stream a lot more than free users on most platform (most evident with Spotify).
Hi Nickd!
It’s about songs that are actually not available for streams, it refers to purchased-only songs. The ratio is not set at 0 still because the video can still be viewed and some smaller platforms may have them available for streams.
Hi, good work! While I agree it was time to use QQ Music to calculate Chinese streams, it also raises some questions. By pay-only titles, do you mean songs that require a subscription to be streamed or do you mean songs that can only be purchased? Let’s take an example. The album version of Taylor Swift’s Love Story isn’t available to be streamed freely anymore, while Justin Bieber’s Baby has been made available in the last year or so. The music video of Love Story however has more views (around 20M vs 11M) and its audio file shows that it… Read more »
Hi Fanofpop! We use parent album streams (which can actually be a single in QQ) to consider a song streamable or not. What matters is the absolute status, not the current one. In concrete words, Love Story is part of several album IDs with significant streams, so even if they blocked the song now, we will consider it has been streamable and thus apply *50. The main issue will come for songs that used to be blocked for long and have been made available recently. We should be able to see it quite easily as parent album streams will be… Read more »
Thank you so much for the clarification and I’m glad you’re already aware of these issues. Also great to know the ratios wouldn’t change significantly with the new metric. So things stay consistent. Thanks again for all the hard work.
hi, can i ask you, how do you see how many listeners a song has on QQ music i have the Desktop and Android app and couldn’t figure that out…