A lifted ChartMasters.org is on!

It’s a big day! Nearly 5 years after the website was first launched, the continuous growth in popularity of ChartMasters led us to offer you this improved version.

If the frontend doesn’t look so much different, in the insides this is a whole new world!

During the last few months, the usage of our tool has been growing a lot. At the moment, more than 12,000 searches are performed every day on our Spotify numbers tool.

Even an improved version of this tool uploaded in early May this year wasn’t enough anymore yet as performances of our server were struggling.

To the overall slowness and some downtimes were added many maintenance operations in the background.

Ultimately, this reduced our pace of publication since I was left with very little time to work on new CSPC entries.

Stevie Wonder, Van Halen and a bunch of updates are patiently waiting for too long. It was time to react and do the much-needed adjustments!

ChartMasters now has a Premium tier

I’ve been an active presence on chart related online sites for nearly 20 years, joining various forums from 2001 onwards and dropping my first website in 2004.

My obsession for numbers goes back to my youngest years while my advocate personality leads me to fight misinformation strongly as soon as I read something untrue.

This was my main goal when I decided to start ChartMasters, as the motto reveals, and it still is.

Thus, I never wanted to turn it into a business. It is just too big now to avoid it though as investments both in time and money make it a necessity.

I went on to build a model that I believe will make it better for all, with improved website performances and an usage that fits your profile.

You will still be able to browse our articles without logging in. With the free Silver plan, you can also perform up to 3 searches a day on our streaming tool.

It was fundamental for us that teenagers fans of an artist can still access to this information.

Gold members can enjoy up to 10 searches, consult the entire all-time most streamed artists list and check back history using the Artist Spotlight page.

If you want an unlimited access to all our tools, that is possible thanks to the Platinum plan. Visit our membership accounts list at this page.

To reward all of you who have been reading us for years, you can use the coupon EARLYBIRD to get heavier discounts on both paid plans than the welcome offer.

New features are all around

Even if we have been doing a lot for free for many years, we wouldn’t roll out premium plans without doing a bit more still.

The red menu bars and titles reflect that we moved to our upgraded server. It’s over 10 times faster than the previous one.

Naturally, Premium users can navigate the website free of ads.

We also optimized a lot of elements in our configuration, from the traditional image compressions to new developments and indexes to improve our codes and queries.

The load time of the most streamed artists list for example went from nearly 20 seconds to 2.2 seconds.

Our 30+ optimization ToDo list isn’t completely, since some of them required the server to be moved already, so expect more gains shortly.

We also completely revamped the technical architecture of our streaming tool to improve response times sharply.

In the past, tracking every Justin Bieber track needed more than 10 minutes because of heavy presence on multi-artists compilations.

It was so long that we had to restrain this access, removing all songs from the appears on section from our searches.

We are now able to browse his complete discography in roughly 9 seconds.

Thanks to these massive performance gains orphan tracks are now added to our tools.

We went deeper by listing both “orphan songs” and “features”. Both categories are made of songs from the appears on section, but they are separated depending on if the artist is the first one listed or not.

Orphan songs are mostly participations to Soundtracks, were the artist is the prime singer, while features have some other artist listed as the main one according to the Spotify API.

Our Platinum members can also enjoy a fresh new Discogs app. You only have to search for an artist and you get every record, in every version, with the number of owners attached.

This gives an instant look to where and how much each disc was successful. Chart fans will love it for sure.

More details from the various updates are provided inside our tools descriptions page. Have a look if you would like to know it all.

As usual, your comments are welcome, I’ll no doubt keep you updated very soon.

If you face something wrong, just ping us by email, with a comment or on Twitter.

Early days of a completely new server and a DNS change are always challeging with errors popping up here and there when everything is rolled out, but we are working on setting up the configuration and the website perfectly as fast as possible.

I hope you will appreciate this lifted version and the effort that was put into it. See you soon for new CSPC articles!