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Looking at the Top 40 albums in the UK this week, it is clear that the charts have become a mausoleum. There are solid showings from Oasis (a compilation album originally released in 2010 and two studio albums from 1994 and 1995), Fleetwood Mac (a compilation from 2018 and a studio album from 1977), Abba (1992), Michael Jackson (2005), Elton John (2017) and Eminem (2005). A quarter of the UK’s Top 40 albums were originally released over a decade ago. Are our music tastes becoming increasingly nostalgic? The number of people who turned out to see Rod Stewart playing the legends slot at Glastonbury certainly suggests that. But there’s also another possibility: music streaming is causing the charts to spiral backwards into the past.
The UK charts date back to 1952, when the New Musical Express, now known as NME, would phone a handful of record shops to ask what was selling best. Since then it’s become more professional: the Official Charts Company (OCC) took over the charts in the 1990s, and as of 2004, it began to factor in download sales. The biggest transformation arrived in 2014, when streaming data started to be included in chart ratings. Though streaming arguably saved the record business (artists and songwriters argue they are not seeing much of that upside), it also suffocated the charts.
Part of this is because UK charts today reflect two very different dynamics: mega-acts with phenomenal streaming play counts that keep on snowballing (Sabrina Carpenter or Ed Sheeran, for example), alongside acts who can marshal their fans to buy a physical version of the album on release week, charting high but plummeting the next week (basically every indie band). As they currently exist, the charts paper over this unholy bifurcation, on the one hand measuring listens and on the other measuring purchases.
The problem lies in trying to perfect a formula for what the OCC calls “album stream” units. This involves counting up the 16 most-streamed tracks from any album and dividing that by 1,000, the result being the “same” as a CD, LP or download sale of that album. But since the data that the OCC receives from retailers and streaming services isn’t accurate enough to tell whether someone has played Bohemian Rhapsody on Queen’s Greatest Hits album, say, or from the studio album where it first appeared, it means that the individual track streams count towards the chart position of entire albums – so Queen’s Greatest Hits moves up the charts, even if people have only been listening to one particular track.
Streaming has made listening more chaotic and less structured. Rather than just listening to a single album from start to finish, we encounter individual songs through playlists and algorithmic recommendations. Meanwhile, since every song is available to listen to, everything can theoretically count towards the charts at any time. This was not always the case. In 1994, Wet Wet Wet’s cover of Love Is All Around was at No 1 in the UK for 15 consecutive weeks. It might have been longer, but the band and their label stopped manufacturing copies to kill demand, fearing the song had become too popular and ubiquitous. That was possible in the days when only physical sales counted towards the charts.
The OCC is in a tricky position. It has to please both the record companies and the retailers and streaming services that fund it, which have very different objectives. There has always been a precarious relationship of mutual dependence and distrust between record labels and music retailers, and the OCC’s chart committee is made up of both sides. The record companies tend to favour fewer restrictions on how they market and promote records, alongside boundless support for their priority releases; the retailers and streamers, on paper at least, want less label interference in how they pick what to support. Sometimes they find consensus; other times they do not.
Yet the doldrums of the UK album charts isn’t inevitable. The UK singles chart is more fluid, with a complex mix of risers, fallers, non-movers and new entries. Most tracks on this week’s singles charts were relatively new (with the exception of Black Eyed Peas’ Rock That Body at No 31, which was originally released in 2010). It’s fair to say that the listlessness of the UK charts is very much an album charts problem. Singles charts aren’t weighed down with records from generations ago.
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It is a similar story in many other national charts, especially where streaming is the dominant force. There is, however, a way forward. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) is doing something about its music charts – and the UK should take note. From September, its main album and singles charts will only include music released in the past two years, with a separate chart quarantining all the timeworn releases.
There are exceptions for those catalogue tracks that have a second chart life from out of nowhere, perhaps because they’ve gone viral on TikTok. So long as they’ve not been anywhere in the Top 100 for the past decade, they can still appear on the charts – but they can’t stay there for ever.
It is a long overdue corrective and will hopefully be something the UK chart can learn from if it is to avoid collapsing into irrelevance. The OCC already publishes a multitude of charts by genre, so separating out the fresh from the greying will not be a stretch. Like the weather, talking about the charts was once a collective British pastime. But in becoming sluggish and shackled by the past, the charts risk being the two things that pop music itself should ever be: old and boring.
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Eamonn Forde is a music business and technology journalist
