the irony is that never before have we had so much variety accessible, yet people keep listening to same ol stuff due to algorithms and psychological effect of having so many options available that you do not know what to listen on your own.

as for albums charts, this is what happens when you streams be double accounted for on the singles and albums charts.

Edited July 25Jul 25 by www2

1 hour ago, Gaia said:

Well if people actually made good music in the year of 2026 their songs would be hits. But people have begun to mostly listen to old music because the new music isn't hitting

That's not true. Playlists keep old music popular. The equivalent would be if radio stations would ONLY play old songs, never new songs and new albums would not have been displayed in stores, but only old ones.

Like someone goes in a record store in 1998 and asks where the new Madonna album Ray of Light is... and clerk says, we don't have it, but buy Erotica instread.

Official charts should represent what the GP consumes, old or new music, in total transparency. No recurrency rules, no ACR, no 3 track per artist and all that bullsh!t. And NO radio crap.

And it would be interesting to also have two seperate subcharts for current (released less than 2 years ago) and catalog music.

1 minute ago, www2 said:

this is what happens when you let double accounting on the charts...

Also true... in order to prevent that.. charts should allow streaming on songs, but on albums... only the least streamed song is looked at bc that one determines how often an album was streamed... (yes interludes etc count as a song). Showgirl for example was fully streamed 206 million times = 137k global units from Spotify streams.

The Fame = 23,5 millio complete Spotify streams = 15,720 global units from streaming for that album.

That's a much truer consumption metric and would continue the tradition of 1 album sales = 1 sale.

1 hour ago, Gaia said:

Well if people actually made good music in the year of 2026 their songs would be hits. But people have begun to mostly listen to old music because the new music isn't hitting

While I agree 2026 hasn't been a stellar year so far, I think the reason new music is seemingly not performing as well is because of the lack of monoculture. I would really love to see an actual "current" vs "catalogue" consumption from Spotify/AM to see if true or not, but I would guess people are listening to just as much new music as before, but the streams of new music are much less concentrated on a few big songs and way more niche.

Meanwhile old hits that benefitted from monoculture will naturally have a higher reach and therefore are artificially overrepresented in nowadays charts.

I think old songs dominating the charts is a mirror to our society:

People wanna listen to old tracks because times right now suck. Living on this planet is terrible, and people wanna reminisce and think about times when things didn't totally suck. People don't wanna listen to new tracks because being rooted in the present reminds people of how terrible the reality of the here and now actually is. Music right now is a comfort, a coping mechanism. And new things are not comfortable.

I think newer artists would have a better chance of breaking through, if we weren't on the fast track to worldwide fascism.

18 minutes ago, stevyy said:

Also true... in order to prevent that.. charts should allow streaming on songs, but on albums... only the least streamed song is looked at bc that one determines how often an album was streamed... (yes interludes etc count as a song).

I don't think it's really sensical to do that. 99% of albums have at least one song you want to skip (or better yet, with the simplicity of streaming, remove/delete). I agree that considering every streams equal in regards to album units is not the greatest approach because it makes one-hit wonders look like album sellers, but just counting the lowest streamed track is even worse imo. Maybe something like looking at the average streams would make more sense? I don't really know tbh.

Edited July 25Jul 25 by Incandescent Glow

Nobody cares about charts except terminally online gays. I've never met a single straight person with a job who could name multiple different artists' peak chart positions and weeks in the top 10 like everyone on this site can.

I think yall are also reading too much into the old songs doing so well. A large portion of the population mainly listens to older music and has for decades, it just wasn't reflected on the charts during the digital era since they either feel no need to buy a song they may have owned on cd or vinyl or hear all the time on certain radio stations. With streaming now those plays now just count towards the charts unlike before.

3 hours ago, Toxic Love said:

Now this is what I call top-tier research

Ended ChatGPT!

I think it has more to do with music being more accesible right now compared to what it was before the streaming area, now you just pay 13 dls or so and have access to all the music you want, that way you rediscover old music and stuff, TT has also influenced this with old music going viral which causes them to explode once again.

I for one don't mind them but it also indicates the state of current music is more old songs are charting rather than news one, it's like nothing new is sticking out.

Whatever just stream my faves lol

I think this is the consequence of letting only and exclusively nepo babies into the mainstream industry

We don't have real talented artists rising anymore

They need a billionaire parent to promote them

Yes we har nepo babies in the past, but we only have nepo babies in the new gen.

There is no real talent

The charts should count old music because that's what people want to stream

Edited July 25Jul 25 by Trent W

New music sucks

Plus, old songs' streaming numbers go to the parent album that's selling better, aka why most Best of records flood the charts

2 hours ago, Incandescent Glow said:

I don't think it's really sensical to do that. 99% of albums have at least one song you want to skip (or better yet, with the simplicity of streaming, remove/delete). I agree that considering every streams equal in regards to album units is not the greatest approach because it makes one-hit wonders look like album sellers, but just counting the lowest streamed track is even worse imo. Maybe something like looking at the average streams would make more sense? I don't really know tbh.

That concept of not needing all of the artists work on an album and not needing to listen to / buy all of the tracks on an album was invented by the evil company, called Apple. While every song, good or bad, had to be bought back in the day, the album as an artistic vision was bought in its completion. Whatver we are doing now, dissolves the meaning of an album. If you only listen to 3 songs from an album.. you are not listening to an album anymore... you are listening to songs.

By that logic the albums charts should be dissolves and no longer be continued when people do not listen to albums anymore, but only songs.

I buy Vinyl, so I have no choice but to listen to the an album in total, as it was intended.

Btw, skipping tracks was only possible with the advent of the CD, in 1984. The CD became the dominant market medium in the early 1990s... so ... even the skipping function is still fairly new in comparison to the length of the music industry.

Whatever charts reflect today is no longer the same as what they reflected in the past...

4 hours ago, Toxic Love said:

Now this is what I call top-tier research

I wouldn't say broken but nostalgia hits are really taking over newer hits and outlasting them despite selling millions of pure sales.

Eras nowadays are very fanbase driven and not that strong. They also lack multiple hits like those other albums. Which also allows them to chart higher.

15 hours ago, Billionaire said:

the Kalshi betting stuff

Been seeing this stuff pop up a couple of times these last few days but I am not sure I know what it means? What's going on?

3 hours ago, LOTF said:

Been seeing this stuff pop up a couple of times these last few days but I am not sure I know what it means? What's going on?

Kalshi is similar to a betting site, but is setup with a legal framework where users trade "event contracts" (derivatives) tied to future outcomes. Apparently this means it can operate under similar rules (and legal status) to the futures market.

In July 2026, Spotify became involved in a controversy after confirming the removal of over 500,000 artificial streams from the song "Earrings" by artist Malcolm Todd, which had suddenly reached the top of the platform's daily charts in the United States. The fraud was initially detected and flagged by a trader on Kalshi, who was using Spotify data analysis to wager on the chart performance of songs. The trader questioned the legitimacy of the sudden spike in streams, prompting Spotify to investigate and confirm the manipulation of figures through bots.^[62][63]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalshi

People on the platform have also been betting on things such as whether these will be starvation in Gaza.

The Real News Network

CNN partners with Kalshi, a gambling app that lets you wa...

The network will integrate betting odds for life-and-death issues into its coverage. What could possibly go wrong?

23 hours ago, stevyy said:

I looked at the German and British singles and albums charts.

Singles:
40 old songs - Germany
32 old songs - UK

Albums:
68 old albums - UK
60 old albums - Germans

I am too lazy to check other music industries... but I assume it is the same everywhere.

I know we have this discussion every December with Christmas songs... but should old music not be allowed to chart?

The chart should represent the most consumed music currently...if 40% is older music then so be it

4 hours ago, LesFleur said:

The chart should represent the most consumed music currently...if 40% is older music then so be it

But then the haterz should stop arguing Xmas songs should be excluded from the charts when during the rest of the year half of the charts is filled with songs ranking from 1972 to 2011.

The best representation is the global digital ranking which measures activity across all platforms and I tunes. The top 20 there is very representative of the current big players in music.

i'd love if it were old stuff from Michelle Branch and Hilary Duff getting a revival but it's **** like danza kuduro or Pitbull songs

On 7/25/2026 at 3:36 PM, Dialamba said:

Someone said as soon as artists started to sell their masters there has been a sudden rise of old songs smashing, old songs pulling numbers isn't old new but that's too much, modern songs have no longevity

Because older songs started gaining popularity again, investment funds became interested in acquiring artists' catalogs.

To everyone who says charts aren't the best way to measure success: what could be better than a ranking of the most popular songs at any given moment?

maybe they should make 2 charts, one including old hits and one for new hits