"It's still number one, it's Top of the Bit.lys"

An article from Digital Spy today (which was in turn digested from The Sun) has raised The Pop Web's ire. According to sources at the BBC (a source within the 8 or so people who work for the Official Charts Company is curiously absent) there have been discussions to reform the UK Singles chart. We want to draw out one important consequence of using the word "reform" right off the bat:

When people say they want reform, they never quite get around to stipulating how much reform they want.

The "plan" if it's even reached that stage, would be to try and take into account the various streaming media which people now use to access and consume music (the article mentions Facebook, MySpace and Youtube, but presumably such a plan would have to also include services such as We7, Spotify and, if it gets off the ground properly, mFlow). The justification on the face of it, is sensible: nowadays we don't just access music by going down to the record store and buy yourself a single or album. Indeed, we might not even download a song that we like. We might simply get a youtube/spotify account, put something into a playlist/constantly press refresh and listen away to our hearts content. The argument proceeds, that given the popularity of these methods of accessing songs, then it could be argued that a chart based upon the physical/digital sales of tracks does not reflect which tracks are the most popular. On its own terms, this argument is all fine and dandy. There may even be some truth in it.

HOWEVER, this does not mean that some poor sod at the Official Charts Company should henceforth be assigned to totting up the hits on a youtube video in order to work out what is actually number 1. For a start, every single one of the services above have a methodological flaw to them which would render their inclusion in the chart almost completely untenable. Let us take them one by one.

Confusing a song's popularity for its video's popularity

Lady Gaga's Telephone video recently amassed half a million views within twelve hours. In a development which was perhaps not unexpected, the song reached number 1 the following week. You won't be shocked to learn that the song itself didn't amass anywhere near that level of sales. All this statistic demonstrates, is that the video (or, possibly the song) attracted enough interest to convince people to view it a total of half a million times. It does *not* demonstrate that the same number of people enjoyed the song. Now if Telephone's youtube hits counted towards its chart position, we'd be very surprised if it wasn't still number 1 in the UK. As it happened, Telephone notched up two weeks before being knocked off by Scouting For Girls. Let's move to a hypothetical point: what if there is a song which millions of people listen to on youtube but a paltry few ever download? Why should that translate into a higher chart placing, when the PROMOTIONAL video fails to translate into record sales , should the song chart higher? The problem with incorporating youtube views into a song's chart position, is that it runs the risk of confusing a song's popularity with its video.

Duplication

A second problem: which video do you count? Take the recent invasion of the charts by the Glee Cast. Since the start of the year, they've scored 7 top 40 hits. *None* of them, have an official video. They all reached the charts based upon people seeing the show (or perhaps hearing the song independently) and *downloading* the track. If we take "Don't Stop Believin'" as an example, at current count, 3 separate videos featuring the song appear on youtube when you search for it. Do all of those videos get counted towards its chart position? How about only those which contain an iTunes link to the song? Again, what if people are choosing to listen to a video which doesn't contain this link? A counterargument to this latter point may be that the chart has always recognised and exclusively considered official channels when people download music (which is why services like limewire unsuprisingly aren't considered when the chart is compiled). This proposal to reform the chart wouldn't simply affect the output of Radio 1 from 4-7pm on Sundays: changing the chart would require the very infrastructure of music hosting services such as youtube to change.

The Twitter problem

Picture the scene: we're on twitter (follow us "@" thepopweb *by the way*). We're perhaps in a library or a cafe. We've got spotify or last.fm on and a song comes on we really like. We think *we know* we'll tell everyone about it, thanks to these wonderful social networking devices we have. The link to said song, though, is rather large, and we want room for a comment: so we go to a link shortening website, retrieve our wieldier link, and post something like:

Thepopweb http://bit.ly/aqkj4f <- Listen to this. It's literally better than Beethoven

You, intrigued, click on our link. It redirects you to Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto No.4" "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga. Well done, completely unwittingly, you've just added a view to a video/a hit on a song and contributed to your chart position. Did you mean to? Probably not. But that's the problem with trying to include media which can be extremely "apropos of nothing" into an institution which aims to take a snapshot of the popularity of music. You don't have the same problem with sales figures. However much we may try, we're probably never likely to be able to trick you into purchasing and downloading "Love Don't Live Here" by Bananarama :-( in the exact same way we're unlikely to trick you into buying a CD by slipping it into a copy of The Sun when you next go to the newsagents (please ignore the extremely slim chance of a newsagent which isn't called WH Smith sellling CD singles). New media allows us to recommend songs to people extremely easily. The only way of determining whether those recommendations have any effectiveness is to measure... yes, you guessed it... whether people then go on to purchase a copy of said songs for themselves.

So to sum up...

Including anything other than sales into the UK Singles Charts is an incredibly bad idea. Essentially all these proposals would do, would be to create a 2.0 version of the old Pepsi Chart, where how many times a song was played on the radio counted towards its chart positions. Yes, that's right, when the GCAP network decided to push *this* down everyone's throats in 1999, it counted towards its chart position, despite the fact that that heavy promotion didn't translate to sales. These proposed changes carry the same methodological flaws which allow the charts to be hi-jacked by special interests (whether it be a record company trying to spike a chart position, or a Rage-esque chart campaign which sacrifices a measure of a song's commercial success amongst the majority for the agenda of a disgruntled minority, but we've already talked about that).  

Ultimately, the only reliable measure of a song's popularity is how well promotional efforts translate into people parting with their hard earned (or indeed, nefariously earned, we don't really care) cash to have the music in their collection.