What are the U.S. Billboard singles charts based on?

as far as what the singles charts are based on, i always assumed someone just made them up, kind of like they used to do with the albums charts.

I'm pretty sure Billboard has a retail singles chart.

Can't find a better thread for this but has the Billboard rock chart always had this much old shit on it https://www.billboard.com/charts/rock-songs

"Dream On" and "We Will Rock You" appear to have both been in Super Bowl commercials so maybe their placement has something to do with how YouTube streaming is factored in?

this column from the week after chester bennington died, which led to a ton of linkin park songs debuting on the chart, seems to explain their rule for this sort of thing:

Older songs are eligible to appear on the 50-position chart in the top 25 if sparked by a meaningful reason for their return to prominence.

so an old song can be on this chart if it's being heavily consumed and billboard judges its growth to be culturally meaningful or something like that. i guess the super bowl is meaningful.

this is part of why i almost never check billboard's new crop of sales/airplay/streaming hybrid genre charts -- stagnant and full of old shit.

yeah, I know old songs chart now, but it seems unusual for there to be this much of it at one time

For the second week in a row, Taylor Swift has charted all 20 new songs in the Billboard Hot 100. Historic, but with asterisks.

I'm fine with a most of these songs charting -- that's just how people consume music now and Midnights is indeed huge, but less fine with the 20th song charting. I think the 20th song's stats should count towards album units, and it's number as the baseline and all songs above it count as singles plays.

Eg. if Song 1 has 20M listens, and Song 20 has 5M, That counts as 5M album plays and Song 1 has 15M single listens.

Sorry new here, dunno if y'all care about this -- music charts is a big handshake between my music nerd self and my stat nerd self, so can't help it.

So your logic is: the song on any album with the least number of streams is only being listened to in the context of the whole album?

Ha, yeah, I guess pretty much!

Sort of turns it from an individual's album listen to a collective's album listen. 20 of us each listen to one song, feel that should count as an album listen instead of 10 single listens.

But yeah I can understand wy this idea might not take hold. :-)

20 single listens -- new here and used to edit buttons hehe

Huh, Leon Neyfakh once posted here!

there are fewer true 'hit songs' at any given moment in the u.s. these days (broadcast radio becoming more conservative than perhaps ever, streaming serving siloed audiences, 'grassroots' hits arising from social media phenoms that labels are bad at predicting/rigging = american pop culture stagnating, imo perhaps for good this time around). what some chartwatchers call 'album bombs' are a fixture of the singles chart these days because it is frankly a reality of how music is consumed now in this landscape: album cuts from new event releases will frequently be (at least briefly) a bigger deal than most of the also-ran radio singles that most ppl don't give a shit either way about (i'm being facetious/mean, but honestly the top of the charts are pretty consistently weak points-wise at any given time lately, reflective of anemic streaming *and* airplay numbers).

another related reality is that the biggest hits -- things like "levitating" or "blinding lights" or "stay" or "as it was" or "heat waves" -- will stick around forever. some other chartmakers like the uk's official charts have decided that they need to institute rules similar to the one you have mentioned that systematically ignore some consumption from album cuts or hit singles that have stuck around long enough so people who watch the charts for entertainment (which no one should do -- i say as someone who has wasted countless hours on this nonsense) will stop getting mad that the charts no longer look how they used to when they were teenagers or w/e. i don't really support this practice, but it is ultimately up to them to decide how to best keep their charts relevant

television and early recording industry historian tim brooks, in his review panning the pseudo-historical reference title pop memories by the otherwise-trustworthy joel whitburn (may he rip), notes among the book's biggest flaws that it consistently represents patterns of song popularity in the early days as comparable to what we are used to seeing in the 'rock era' that we associate with the heyday of record charts, when in reality a major hit for a label in the early 20th century was often its biggest seller for multiple years straight. (he points to a song called "the holy city", which was victor's best seller for several years but which was listed in the book's made-up charts as #2 for one week.)

as the american starmaking machinery continue to grind to a near-halt i frankly don't see it as a far-fetched possibility that we ultimately return to similar patterns, with an absolutely tiny number of true consensus hits at any given time, each of which enjoys truly oppressive longevity, and non-single tracks from the also-declining number of mainstream-relevant albums percolating through the ether for a short period until the next event release comes along. i don't see any point in trying to rig the charts to prop up the illusion that pop culture operates in a manner that it very clearly does not operate in anymore

lol that random post from the ya kid k fan <3

I know nothing about the subject matter, but that review you linked to is a brutal takedown!

Lots of stale tracks in the top 20 now:

6. Shaboozey - A Bar Song - 60 weeks on the chart
7. Gaga & Bruno Mars - 42 weeks
8. Teddy Swims - Lose Control - 94(!) weeks
9. Benson Boone - Beautiful Things - 71 weeks
12. Chappell Roan - Pink Pony Club - 51 weeks
13. Billie Eilish - Birds of a Feather - 55 weeks
15. Post Malone - I Had Some Help - 56 weeks
20. Sabrina Carpenter - Espresso - 60 weeks

yep. old guard tastemakers (at radio, etc.) are nervously crossing their fingers that the unfolding systemic chaos/dysfunction will translate to grassroots creative breakthroughs that reinvigorate the industry but nope, sorry, you're reaping what you've sown and this is what we're getting instead. if ur so confused abt why ur audiences are so "divided" and there are so few "consensus" cultural products today maybe u could try asking the ghouls at the "news"/talk station down the hall. rest in piss to american pop culture

that laughably boring "lose control" song breaking the all-time longevity record while still in the top 10... yeah pack it up, it's over

"lol that random post from the ya kid k fan"

When I woke up this morning I didn't expect to see that name again. But not for the first time Ya Kid K has fooled me. Infamously Technotronic replaced her with a fashion model in the video for "Pump Up the Jam". My hunch is that someone, somewhere, has written a university essay about Technotronic and neo-colonialism, given that the band was founded by a pudgy white Belgian guy whose modus operandi involved appropriating Africa and African-American cultural styles, and in the case of Ms K literally a person born in actual Africa, and then erasing them. If there was any justice in the world the boss of EMI records would have had Jo Bogaert's hands cut off for being unable to follow the commercial success of Technotronic's debut album, but as far as I can tell that didn't happen. I apologise for going off topic. I can't even blame the drink. Because it's Sunday morning and I've only had two drinks so far.

On-topic, I think one problem with hoping for a grassroots creative breakthrough is that there already was a reaction to Donald Trump and his stereotypical ilk, back in the 1980s. The likes of The Replacements and The Pixies were in part a counterblaste to the 1980s version of Trump - the over-eager real estate mogul who wanted to demolish Detroit and replace it with Delta City etc. The more time passes the more I realise that Robocop was a prophecy. Unfortunately the indie scene of the 1980s didn't set the chart on fire at the time. Neither did punk in the UK circa 1976-1977, beyond a couple of star acts. Ironically the likes of Technotronic actually were a grassroots phenomenon that actually did sell a lot of records, but they didn't have a political dimension beyond radical dancing and opposing the criminal justice act of 1993.

This raises the question of whether Youtube has a music chart. It's obviously a lot easier to spoof than raw sales data, but it has a wider reach and would account for revivals of things that weren't chart hits in the Anglosphere during their original run, e.g. "Plastic Love". A bit of googling reveals that Youtube actually does have a chart, but it's no good. Number one is a radical reworking of Neneh Cherry's "Manchild" by Sabrina Carpenter, which manages to be less musically inventive than a song that came out thirty years ago, with a video that parodies sexism by having Carpenter wearing tiny cut-off shorts... but it's ironic, or something.

youtube has plenty of charts: https://charts.youtube.com/

the audio charts have those same chestnuts but with more rap and regional mexican hits mixed in. the music video charts skew newer