Forum
Hey! please add Dancing With the devil... The Art Of Starting Over from Demi Lovato, Who have a standard and bônus track edition. love u gays!
Are these lists complete/accurate or there might be albums that are still missing? Thanks for your hard work!
We're still adding a lot of albums, but the higher ranks should be fairly complete
you Only added Speak Now the Standard version, The deluxe edition is at 973,540,829 streams
Do any Madonna albums have a chance to appear in any year? Many of her songs have several versions in compilations, etc.
I'm not 100% sure and I know there are many albums listed that are deluxe versions, but I think the intention is just to have the streaming numbers of tracks from the standard/original release.
The other days I mentioned that a few album deluxe versions included tracks that were not originally on the standard album, as well as demos, remixes, live versions of tracks that were. I thought MJD would just remove the tracks not originally on the listed album and retain demos, remixes etc of tracks that were (as per how EAS is calculated) but instead he removed everything, just leaving the original album track listing.
It depends how deep each year goes, if they go to Top 20s or 30s, then yes she will appear but I reckon she'll struggle to get into most yearly Top 10s, with 86 or 89 the only possibilities.
At the moment, her most streamed album, 1984s Like A Virgin (including every remix, version etc) is on 416m streams, so quite a way of the #8 album, Princes Purple Rain on 587m.
Hi Martin!
Here I'm fine adding deluxe editions which add outtakes and the likes. Since contemporary releases always add several tracks after some months, I feel it would be unfair to historical albums to not add as well their deluxe reissues which include similar 'new' songs, especially since they don't bring that many streams anyway.
What we do exclude are albums which contain hits from remaining albums like 'Patience' counted on AFD, these releases are excluded.
The process on these pages is different from the one on the streaming tool. The tool recovers all distinct streams of an artist and has functions to try to agglomerate as many tracks as possible into the original albums. These functions will merge albums under some conditions, recognize titles once content between parenthesis is removed, etc.
The top annual albums process is more straight forward, we stick to original album IDs as available on Spotify database. When an album has 5, 6 or more different versions on Spotify, we set up 1 as the valid ID, which is the one with the highest number of streams that shouldn't be excluded (because of previously mentioned situations). Thus since Appetite For Destruction super deluxe is not valid, we switch to the next album version, without doing treatments "inside" of a tracklist (which would be way too complex with so many albums).
please fix the Speak Now issue, every other album in the 2010s Page is the deluxe version
I thought it might be a case of all or nothing, if there is an outside track on the deluxe version.
This could be quite messy IMO, as while we are not exactly measuring oranges against apples, it does seem as though we are measuring Braeburns vs Coxs vs Granny Smiths, if you get what I mean.
Well I don't really agree with this. When an album that barely came out has a deluxe reissue, we count it (see the last Demi or Bieber albums, they already have one). When an album is 3-12 months old (virtually 100% of the albums inside the 2020 list), we consider it valid. Why would a reissue out after 3-5-10-20 years be considered as not eligible? Because the "original tracklist" isn't that one? When every successful album in music history came out in so many versions, I don't think the myth of the original tracklist makes much sense tbh. Tons of albums didn't even had the same tracklist everywhere when they first came out even if many popular websites want us to believe that the US version is the only one which ever existed!
I think you've missed my point.
My point is that, not all albums listed will be equal, some will have super deluxe/deluxe etc versions included because the tracks are all versions of tracks originally on that album but albums like Appetite, lose all of it's super deluxe tracks because their is no deluxe version to downgrade to and the results can't just exclude tracks not directly or originally related to the album and retain the super deluxe tracks that do, we end up losing them all. On top of this (as you mention), they all exclude versions of their tracks from other releases (unless also included on a super deluxe/deluxe version). So we have differing/conflicting streaming totals for albums on the site.
We could end up with;
Albums that include all super deluxe, because all tracks relate to the original album
Albums that include deluxe but not super deluxe, because some of the super deluxe do not relate to the original album but all the deluxe do
Albums that lose everything because both deluxe & super deluxe include songs not originally related to the album or there is no deluxe to downgrade to
At least that's my take on it.
Even if we decide to only count only the "original" version of an album will we still have issues like this I think.
There are several albums which only have a deluxe/extended/whatever version and not a "original". This is especially true for many catalogue artists.
I do agree with MJD here, in my opinion does the current "criteria" give us the most comprehensive look. But it's of course debatable.
I think you've also missed my point Al.
My point is purely that, not all albums, that are included, are being measured equally. I guess it needs manual fixing, to ensure each album has every track assigned to it, that should be, as oppose to wiping entire deluxe versions, for the sake of a few rogue tracks or having to include them in full (with rogue tracks) because there is no other version or alternative, through restrictions on how the source data can be interrogated and what results can be generated.
But it's not the most comprehensive look. If you take Appetite or similar albums, the most comprehensive look would be to include the super deluxe tracks that are related to the album and just discard the ones that are not, not just leave off every super deluxe track.
Hi. This is a very interesting update, thank you.
Out of curiosity, for albums that not in the page, do you have to add each albums to their respective years manually, or will each year's page be automatically updated after we search the artist's page in the Spotify numbers tool?
If manual adjustments like this (similar to the song ranking I guess) is doable it would be great. I'm just not sure how convenient that would be for 1k++ distinct releases.
Maybe MJD could expand on this.
Yes, I get that time and effort is the key to it all and in most cases it wont alter things that drastically but it still means not every album is equally represented, some will have higher streams than they should, some will have lesser streams than they should have, while some will of course be exactly correct.
Oh indeed, I misunderstood what you meant!
It would be possible to cherry-pick songs to exclude rather than entire releases (like removing Patience from the AFD reissue). The way to do it is easy, setting up a list of excluded song IDs per album IDs and 'validating' each song before adding it to the breakdown. The two main constraints are:
- that would take an immense manual effort to look at every song from a reissue (some have 50+ songs) to know which are legitimate and which aren't, to exclude the pack as soon as one is incorrect makes it much more straight forward.
- technically speaking while it's simple, that would make the process heavier since for every song we will need to look into a list if the song ID-album ID pair should be excluded, that would slow down pages especially since we print many albums.
While in fact results are thus someway incorrect, we keep some common sense while making decisions. If a reissue has 200m streams from valid additional songs and 1m from a song that should be excluded, we would still add it. So while we don't look for the exact / perfect count because it is too much of work, we do pick the "least erroneous result" 😉
Hi Firdaus!
It is a bit in-between: we automatically detect albums over 500 million streams thanks to user searches, but then we need to add them manually to the annual listings. The reason for this is that most albums have several versions so we need to manually identify which one we want to track, also there are a lot of compilations over the 500 million mark and we need to remove them.
"Pink Friday Roman Reloaded" has a full version called "Pink Friday Roman Reloaded + The Re-Up" with more streams. Beyoncé's B-day has more than 1 billion streams, different from the posted count.
ps. HOMECOMING, by Beyoncé please!!!!!
