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!
Please it’s telling me I have no search credit available
Hi Don Pablo!
Due to an overwhelming number of fake accounts in the past, the new silver members have no search credit available.
Hello,
How come I can’t see any results on the album ”The Kick Inside” by Kate Bush? There are not data for ”Wuthering Heights” or any of the songs from the same album. I Can’t see it on the Top Song View, or Discography View.
Still, Spotify shows that ”Wuthering Heights” has 84.327.147 streams.
So, there is a reason why I can see it on Chartmasters streaming numbers tool?
Thank you. By the way, great job👍👏
Hello,
The tool has stopped working for days. I have no more credit even though I have not had research for days.
Hi lagwach!
I can see that you’ve been able to use the tool again. Was it due to email verification pending? In case something wrong happens, you can contact us by email at contact@Chartmasters.org and get an answer the same day.
Great news ! I’m only interested in CSPC articles and it doesn’t seem to be a top priority anymore so I’ll keep my free access.
Hi Rell! The good membership level is the one that fits your needs so that’s a good choice 😉 I understand your feeling since publications have been sparse lately to say the least. I’ve been working on sales figures for many, many years as you know and I have been facing the same problem since the start: it requires from 3 to 5 years working full time on it to complete all major CSPC artists (say 75m+), so time to get it done, everything is outdated! It’s for this reason that I started industrializing as many things as possible. The… Read more »
I totally understand. Actually, I’ve been ranking all the best-selling albums of each decade on Word pages so I like the CSPC articles because it gives information about albums instead of artists total sales. I know it takes much more time but that’s what interests me the most : album sales, not artists overall sales.
Hi! It would be possible to activate the Premium level access for just 1 month (let’s say at january for year-end purposes) and then move to a silver or gold level access?
Hi Zago! I answered you by email but to share the answer with everyone, yes it’s perfectly possible! I haven’t done a complete round of tests in the case of a switch to a lower tier, so I would suggest to wait the end of the month before going to freemium tier to benefit Platinum rights until the very end. In any case as long as you paid for a month, I configured it so that you can enjoy Platinum access until the end of the month even if you resiliated the account. If for any reason it doesn’t work… Read more »
Thanks MJD!
Hi Chartmasters team, glad to see the website new and improved. I was just wondering if you would consider making the searches that show 0 results not count on the streaming tool. For example, I typed in Beyoncé instead of Beyonce, and so I got 0 results but it still counted as a search. The same thing happened when I typed in Lady Gaga. I got 1 set of results but used all of my searches. Thanks for your consideration
Hi Chika! The decrease of credits only happens inside the if(has results) piece of code. This is possibly due to your time zone not being the US one (which is used for the daily separation). Anyway, we still need to fix this issue which at times prompts instantly “no results found” before indeed printing results when we hit back the search button, as well as fixing the memory allocation problem that turned off the functionality several times since the roll out. To acknowledge this situation I have reset all daily counts back to 0 (so you can use your searches… Read more »
Amazing, thank you! I was also wondering if the reset could/will be at our personal local midnight or if it will always be with the US time zone.
May I also ask if you could fix Little Mix’s tracking page?
Two songs have been missing since months (Power ft. Stormzy and Touch ft. Kid Ink), Spotify lists those as unplayable but they can actually be played and the play counter is still there. Thank you in advance!
Thank you for the quick response! Love the new functionality of the tool and wish the team the best of luck in the future
With the platinum plan will users be able to request artists to be studied?
Also who’s next to be studied, and when will it be released?
Hi Jjr!
This would be closer to Diamond support really, CSPC entries take a lot of time to study, and we don’t necessarily want a few end users to pick the artists as the priority right now is to complete the big ones missing!
Well the idea’s there, I’m sure there would be some users! Are Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young anywhere in the pipeline?
What does the discogs app mean?
Hi Fanofpop! It’s a tool I developed for my own usage when working on CSPC articles. The script uses the Discogs API to retrieve the number of owners of all versions of an artist’s records. Below is the example of Billie Eilish, I use her case since her discography remains small, but for legacy artists there are tens of thousands lines of results. Also, before the 90s releases were country-specific (with less “Europe” versions) so it gives a great reflection of an artist success everywhere in one click. Title Year Master Master ID Label Country Owners Want Formats Party Favor… Read more »
The site is noticeably faster! I’m glad you are getting so much traffic and having success. Hard work pays off!
I noticed that the “Most streamed artists (all-time)” list doesn’t include the features/orphan songs in the totals. Will it be updated to reflect the full totals for each artist? Thanks.
Glad to read that you noticed the speed improvements! As for the most streamed artists list, I updated the queries so that orphan songs are added in – but not features. We though about it and pure features would distort reality (2 Chainz for example would boom from 2.7b to 10b streams!). Right now searches saved inside the database come from the old system. There is a script which controls that the data includes no duplicates by comparing daily increases and the number of songs before saving results into the db. The orphan songs added to the results hit this… Read more »
First! This is an amazing site and the most accurate thank you for dedicating all these years to our curiosity about album/artist music popularity!!
Thank you for your support Tre! I’m confident with these new enhancements we will be able to keep the website afloat and raise back our pace of publications to continue feeding this curiosity!