When did streaming listens become incorporated in the singles chart?
Streaming has undoubtedly become the dominant force of entertainment consumption, for better or worse, and now it’s here for the long stay. As for music, as much as massive streaming corporations such as Spotify have commandeered the medium of our listening habits, it’s only a fairly recent invention, and even more so when it comes to its impact on the charts.
As much as, from a listener’s perspective, streaming is the most convenient and accessible means of having millions of music at your fingertips, for artists, the impact is much more convoluted than we may consider. Not only are royalties a huge issue if you’re trying to make your money from streaming alone, but the details and insights into listening habits are very hard to quantify in a mathematical sense compared to straight-up traditional sales.
That’s why, when the UK charts introduced streaming figures as one of the data sets to contribute to the top 40, it’s fair to say it caused a bit of a stir. Believe it or not, this only came into effect a little over ten years ago on July 29th, 2014, when, for the first time, streaming counted towards what songs made up the charts. In recognition of the fact that tunes like ‘Get Lucky’ by Daft Punk were now receiving in excess of a million streams, it was the moment for the charts to move with the times.
Although controversial, the change also marked a worrying downward decline in physical sales. Up to that point in the year where streaming was introduced in the chart data, 2014 had seen a 12.4% decrease in single sales, representing a market in freefall under streaming’s wrath. Even still, the transition couldn’t be a like-for-like carbon copy of the numbers from completely different music mediums, so the charts had a lot of ironing out to do first.
So, how do streams count towards the singles chart?
Data is taken from music streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer to carve out the stake that streaming takes up over chart influence. At the time of its introduction in 2014, according to the Official Charts, this accounted for roughly 17.4% of tunes that made the cut into the top 40, though it probably goes without saying in the ensuing decade, this is likely to have increased to a much more sizeable chunk.
But comparatively, and from a monetary standpoint, a singular stream of a song is like a drop in the ocean versus physically buying it, so this has to be factored in, too. The equation comes out as one traditional purchase is equivalent to roughly 100 streams, with the body of the chart having consulted with royalty rates and major labels to produce this figure.
However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to quickly pick up the problem – within the streaming age, it takes millions upon millions of streams for artists to even stand a chance of making even the slightest tangible impact on the charts, meaning it is now largely dominated by massive established global stars and gives very little chance for newer artists to have a breakthrough in the way that could have been witnessed when physical sales were still in their prime. This is also not to mention the financial cut, where artists benefitting from sales back in the day were much more flush compared to those being strung along on a pittance by Spotify.
In many ways, it’s a catch-22—it would be ridiculous for the charts to not encompass the mammoth impact of streaming in their data, but in doing so, they have very much created a paradigm where only artists with huge backings can reign supreme, which is a very toxic state of affairs to break. Music has been forever changed by the streaming age, but can we dare ask if we’d have been better off without it?
