Good news music listeners and buyers, the UK is soon to be joining this century! The top 40 singles chart will soon include streamed music as well as physical copies and digital downloads that have been purchased.
This will bring the UK in line with countries like the USA and Germany and provide a more direct representation of what people actually listen to. I mean, how many times have you listened to something on Spotify and not felt the need to download it or by a CD. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who buys CDs… in the world.
Now, what’s bothering us is how will the charts be regulated?
Surely one song streamed once should not have equal weight when put up against a download or the purchase of a whole album from a suffering high-street store. After all, I stream music all the time that I have no intention of actually owning – not because it is embarrassing but because it’s not quite good enough to own. Plus, stuff everyone watches and listens to on Youtube is generally rubbish and is just watched because it was once amusing – Rebecca Black this is a shout out to you with your high quality, intelligent and enjoyable anthems educating the masses on the days-of-the-week .
Another thing that is bothering me, but probably no one else, is what actually constitutes music? If the chart includes streamings from Youtube etc, who classifies what is and isn’t music? For example, an unpublished artist writes some music to accompany a short video or series is that included? Is spoken word included and what about experiential ‘music’ like John Cage – which is music by the way, but what I am trying to say is at point does music just become noise? Anyway, I guess we’re saying we’re interested to see how this will be regulated.
That’s enough about things that bother us. The good news is that music streaming increased by over 30% during the course of 2013 and now accounts for around 10% of music revenue generated in the UK. As this is now such a significant part in music distribution it stands to reason that it is included in the UK top 40 to show a real representation of what we all listen to.
What do you think about combining the purchases and streaming into one chart?