5 major changes at ChartMasters

Improvement

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!

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Rodolfo-

Is Youtube plataform considered for data and popularity index by Chartmasters? Thank you

Johnny be Good

Great news

Last edited 2 years ago by Johnny be Good
Tommy

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…

obro

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

Nickd

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).

Fanofpop

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 »

Fanofpop

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.

L145

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…