Chart Company Makes It Harder For Streaming Hits To Dominate UK Top 40

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Chart Company Makes It Harder For Streaming Hits To Dominate UK Top 40

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Drake’s “One Dance” hit a billion streams on Spotify last week, and he’s yet again Spotify’s most memed streamed artist of the year. His streaming numbers were the reason Views ruled the US charts in 2016.

Drizzy dominated the UK charts too, but one chart company is looking to make it harder for him and other artists to maintain a stranglehold. According to BBC, the Official Chart Company is changing the way it calculates sales via streaming to free up some room at the top of the charts. Currently, 100 streams is equivalent to one “sale” of a song. Starting in January, the ratio will change from 100:1 to 150:1. The company cited the statistic that only 11 songs reached #1 this year, compared to 26 in 2015 and 42 in 2014. The Official Chart Company hopes that the new ratio will bring the numbers closer to when they measured how many times a song was bought as opposed to total consumption. The company’s CEO, Martin Talbot, had this to say about the change in measurement practices:

It is testament to the rapidly changing nature of music consumption in the UK — and the huge shift we are seeing towards streaming — that we are updating the way we measure the contribution of streams to the make-up of the official charts as quickly as we are. Streaming is growing exponentially and the weighting we use to reflect its impact will inevitably keep evolving with it.

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