The Official Charts Company has announced a huge change to the way it compiles statistics, revealing music video plays will now contribute to their rankings.
From Friday 6 July onwards, the weekly UK Singles Chart will include video plays from YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal.
User-generated videos and unofficial clips released by stars won’t count though – so don’t expect to see YouTuber vlogs suddenly storming up the chart.
Instead, it means artists whose officials videos prove popular will receive a boost up the charts, but speaking to the BBC, the company’s chief executive insisted that the change won’t drastically turn the chart upside down.
“This isn’t going to be a handbrake turn,” Martin Talbot said. “We’re not going to suddenly see dozens of songs in the Top 20 that weren’t there before.”
There will also be a change to the way streams are counted. From 6 July, 100 streams of tracks or videos via a subscription service – if you pay for Spotify or Apple Music, then this is you – will count as one “sale” of a song.
For people listening and watching on free platforms – so if you just log onto YouTube and check out ‘This Is America’ – the ratio is higher, and 600 streams will be needed to notch up the equivalent of one sale.
If you can’t quite get your head around it, here’s a handy video of Dua Lipa explaining the new rules (geddit??):
The Official Charts are no stranger to evolution and its been almost exactly four years since streams were first included in the calculations.
In 2015, the new chart release date moved from a Sunday to a Friday, to account for industry changes to release dates.
