The meaninglessness of music charts

By M.H.

IT IS COMMONPLACE for boxing fans to bemoan the senselessness of world titles. With four different governing bodies all anointing champions in each weight class—and one of them naming up to three for each division—it is difficult to say who is the best fighter in the world at any given weight.

A similar problem has beset the music industry. It used to be easy to know who the champions of pop were: it was whoever was number one in the singles chart and number one in the albums chart. But pop music, like boxing, has moved to a model of multiple champions’ belts. Older fans may still regard the list published by Official Chart in Britain, or by Billboard in America, as crowning the undisputed victor, but that is no longer the case.

For there are Spotify’s charts (both the daily one and the weekly one) and there is Apple Music’s chart. There is YouTube’s chart and Shazam’s chart and Deezer’s chart and the iTunes chart. Each monitors a different set of activities. Official Charts takes a combination of sales, streams and downloads, but with limits on how many times an individual artist can appear in the chart. Shazam measures how many times a song is searched for on its app; the others tabulate plays on their platforms. Since each measures different things, they often produce different results.

To make matters worse, within those charts are more charts: to track trends, momentum and viral activity; for vinyl sales; for video views. There are charts for individual countries and for the whole world. There are so many charts that YouTube has started sending out a weekly email to journalists trying to make sense of its own statistics—its top songs charts, its top artists charts, the subscribers to individual artists’ pages and so on. There are so many charts that a company called Chartmetric offers to follow them for the music-industry professional who cannot keep up: “We monitor all of these charts every day, and notify you by email when your artists, tracks, or albums get into one of the charts we are tracking.”

The more charts there are, the less meaning they hold. The less meaning they hold, the harder it is to use them for their specific purpose: measuring one artist’s success relative to another. If someone is top of YouTube’s video chart, but number 20 in Spotify’s weekly songs chart, are they more or less popular than someone who is number eight in both? What if someone completely different is top of the Official Chart? What about people who do not appear in any charts at all, but can sell out bigger concert venues than the streaming stars? How popular are they?

The issue may seem to be a trifling one, but it does matter. The proliferation of charts makes it impossible to discern who is and who is not a big cheese. It is clear who the stars of the movie business are because box-office receipts provide an easy metric by which to measure their wattage. Whether you are a teenager or a pensioner, you have a rough idea of who the biggest film stars are at any given moment, and there is cultural common ground. That is not the case with pop any longer.

Thirty years ago, an average parent and an average teenager would probably both have known the biggest hitmakers of the year. There was one chart, and because there was only one, it mattered. Now, even a music-savvy parent is likely to have no idea who is number one (and nor, very possibly, might their child). Music has become subject to cultural and generational silos. The job of critics and historians, in turn, has become trickier.

Sometimes a consensus can emerge. This week one song has topped the Official Chart, as well as the listings provided by iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Shazam and Deezer. The song is “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I. Still, for many listeners it is probably easier to name a number one from the days when there was only one chart than it is to sing a single bar of it.