UK Charts/ Midweeks 2023

Although there were a few Superbowl and Brits climbers and re-entries, but otherwise :meh:
 
Not much notable. Linkin Park bagging a top 20 hit, and P!nk appearing twice in the top 40 in 2023 makes me feel just a little less old though.
 
Shoat said:
Not much notable. Linkin Park bagging a top 20 hit, and P!nk appearing twice in the top 40 in 2023 makes me feel just a little less old though.
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I missed Linkin Park dipping into the top 20. That must be a pretty tactical fanbase endeavour.
 
I think just a really engaged fanbase. It supposedly held quite steady through the week, so might be some scope for it not to be total one week wonder.

I'm all for it. Rock still "sells" well, but always at such a slow and steady state that it rarely bothers the singles chart anymore.
 
The Linkin Park track is fun! Curious how it doesn't feel out of place at all despite originally being recorded for Meteora.
 
She’s also midweek #1 in albums. Ellie getting the double is surely a slight surprise in 2023.
 
It's easy to feel out of touch / too old for the charts anymore, but it's interesting that most of the number ones those year have been from acts with 10+ years chart history.

OLD FARTS UP
 
Shoat said:
It's easy to feel out of touch / too old for the charts anymore, but it's interesting that most of the number ones those year have been from acts with 10+ years chart history.

OLD FARTS UP
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I can’t help but feel that it’s partly related to the absolute deluge of manufactured pop acts moulded in the style of either Dua Lipa or Billie Eilish or Ed Sheeran either flopping or struggling to break out. Mostly because they’re almost all shit.
 
Even though there's been a little more turnover at the top lately, it's ludicrous how staid and stale the chart still is in some ways. As It Was at number six! Green Green Grass - another song that's basically a year old - in the top ten too. Mimi Webb's been hanging around at number 12 for the last month or two, which has been dry enough in itself, but you'd be fuming if you were her and being blocked from a top ten by those two.

Which frankly makes PinkPantheress collapsing out of the charts already even MORE grating :oi:
 
Genuinely don't understand how As It Was and Green Green Grass are still top 10. If their ACR was reset, I thought it went back again after 3 weeks, surely they are not still increasing sales weekly?? Bizarre! And how the heck is Lewis Capaldi back in the top 10 again with Forget Me? More cd single fuckery maybe.

Also ACR seems to have less of an effect these days at clearing out the old stuff. Taylor Swift, Lewis Capaldi, RAYE, SZA, Miley, Weeknd, Pink Pantheress are all on ACR and still look to be firmly lodged in the top 20 for a while yet.
 
Lewis had a documentary which caused his songs to rise more than 25% of the market or whatnot and get reset, hence flinging back into the chart. I thought the same about As It Was and George but apparently both have had weeks of increase hence they haven’t been sent to ACR since their resets.

The current issue is streaming numbers aren’t high (hence the low ‘sales’ at all positions), so rather than ACR knocking songs down to the low top 40 it means they still have enough streams to hold in the top 20.
 
We're not going to get anywhere until Daniel Ek is finally nicked for money laundering and extortion and, well, that could take a while. Spotify's death is all that can save us now.
 
The laughable thing is that the year-old Harry Styles and George Ezra hits are only back in the top 10 BECAUSE of ACR.

ACR didn't target them, but it did push out newer songs from PinkPantheress, Raye, SZA and Taylor Swift which otherwise racked up higher numbers.

The only real solution is to PROSECUTE anyone still choosing to listen to Green Green Grass.
 
But even then RAYE and Taylor are hardly fresh bangers. The whole thing is looking a bit odd, so it potentially needs an overhaul. But no option perhaps solves the problem that people listen to the same stuff for extended periods of time.

That was always the case, but it was hidden back in the day due to physical products having a finite lifetime of availability.
 
Well, that and the fact that they probably still WERE listening to it on rotation, but only the original sale meant anything.

Not that I'm advocating for a sales only chart any more, that ship sailed years back. Actual sales are so low that it wouldn't be any real reflection of popularity.

I've no idea what the answer is.
 
I think a basic recurrent system would improve things immeasurably. Once a song inside the top 20 has been on the charts for more than 3 months, it gets kicked out the moment it drops below the top 20. No ACR penalties, just fully deleted from the charts.

I genuinely don't know why there's any resistance to this. Nobody is benefiting from 99% of new releases essentially being locked out. Harry Styles, Taylor etc aren't going to sell any fewer albums out of it.
 
Exactly.

I’d argue New Years ‘99 the biggest song in the country was probably Baby One More Time based on year end charts, the fact it was track one on the biggest selling (ever!) compilation, the actual #1 only scanned 36k etc. But it was only #199 in the chart as you couldn’t buy the single anymore as it was released 50 odd weeks before and was no longer produced.

I guess it needs to be decided whether the charts are to be current looking or representing exactly what is consumed irrelevant of date and then moved into that direction.
 
Even As It Was would have been removed after a much more reasonable 21 weeks with a top 20 recurrent system. It fell to #21 in September last year and even got as low as #45 in February. For whatever reason it just keeps coming back.
 
I love music charts (especially UK) but the Spotify charts feels more like what’s actually popular to me than any official chart. But it’s not as FUN as I want it to be and it moves slowly
 
Agree re recurrent system. The only issue I have with it is that it takes so long for some songs to become hits, there is a a danger songs could be put to recurrent before they've had chance to peak. There has to be some way to allow a song that has a genuine resurgence (Running Up That Hill for example) or a slow burner to get a new genuine peak on the main chart.
 
VoR said:
I think a basic recurrent system would improve things immeasurably. Once a song inside the top 20 has been on the charts for more than 3 months, it gets kicked out the moment it drops below the top 20. No ACR penalties, just fully deleted from the charts.

I genuinely don't know why there's any resistance to this. Nobody is benefiting from 99% of new releases essentially being locked out. Harry Styles, Taylor etc aren't going to sell any fewer albums out of it.
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100%. Maybe have some kind of 5000% (or whatever) increase bar to filter through the Running Up That Hill type legitimate revivals of older songs.
 
Yeah completely. Or leave labels the ability to request resets - they’re relatively rare and would be easy to tell if a song meets criteria (Kate, perhaps Duncan Lawrence after it took off on Tik tok and got a second lease of life) or not.
 
I’m curious why Billie Eilish is not credited on the new Labrinth track - she’s even in the video. It’s not a bad song either. It’s looking like his first Top 40 hit in years.
 
That Lewis Capaldi song is SHIT and you can't help but wonder on the overtime his team are putting into getting him number ones.. he was #3 in the midweeks.
 
Lewis had cd singles that sold 19k…he’d be #4 without them.

And Heatwaves got some sort of auto-play for half the week on Spotify so boomed back to the Spotify top ten. This (paid promotion?) has now ended so it’s dropped down now on the App, but not before getting an automatic reset chartwise due to such increasing compared to the market, so will now be hanging around the top 40 for a few weeks.

In other words: ridiculous on all counts.
 
Devil said:
And Heatwaves got some sort of auto-play for half the week on Spotify so boomed back to the Spotify top ten. This (paid promotion?) has now ended so it’s dropped down now on the App, but not before getting an automatic reset chartwise due to such increasing compared to the market, so will now be hanging around the top 40 for a few weeks.

In other words: ridiculous on all counts.
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for fucks SAKE!
 
From this week's Music Week sales report:

Nominated for an Ivor Novello award, and granted a reset from ACR, Glass Animals’ Heat Waves – a ‘sleeper’ hit which peaked at No.5 in 2021 – catapults 84-24 (13,835 sales) this week. It has now spent 105 weeks in the Top 75 – a total surpassed by only seven songs – and has achieved lifetime consumption of 2,407,575 units. More than a decade into their recording career, it remains conspicuously their only hit.
 
I find the success of Heat Waves, and their lack of other hits and inability to shift albums quite fascinating. We don’t really get one hit wonders any more like we used to (and I appreciate in the streaming era it's not quite the same thing), but they must be the biggest example of one for years.

105 weeks in the top 75 for Heat Waves, but not a single other hit. And on the album chart, the album went 2 - 64 - out on original release in 2020, had another week at 20 - out back last summer (I assume a re-release), and that's it.

According to Wikipedia there have been 8 singles released from the album - seemingly none of the others ever gained any traction either in their own right, or enough to get the album bubbling around even the bottom charts.

And isn't it the longest charting hit ever on the Billboard Hot 100 now?
 
For a song with such chart longevity, I've happened upon it fairly infrequently. And when I do, I always seem to think 'yeah, it's pretty good' - but then I pretty instantly forget it. Genuinely can't remember how it even goes now.
 
I'm quite fond of Heat Waves, but that along with the utter staleness of this week's top ten, the grinding worthy MOR David Kushner bore that debuted at #3, and Lewis Capaldi getting a number one with another edition of his one and only song (would a little artistic development FUCKING KILL YOU?!) really made this week's chart quite dispiriting to follow. Everything that's wrong with them at the moment all in one neat package - surely they can't think things can go on like this.
 
What's astonished me is that I've never heard/ heard of a song that's supposedly "sold" 2.5 million copies and so is presumably, and ridiculously, one of the biggest singles of all time.

I'm not sure if that says more about the state of the charts or me.
 
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