Article: Drake breaks Beatles record with 7 of the Top 10 songs on Billboard Hot 100 chart*

So counting unique streams ... that seems like it would make sense.

 

But the second and third and fourth times you're streaming the thing is generating new revenue, whether its ad share or licensing fees and royalties. The second, third, fourth etc time you played a record you bought didn't. The revenue isn't identical to a sale which is why people have concocted an "album equivalent" method of counting streams. But it's not equivalent to one purchase = unlimited streams in terms of cash flow.

 

Idk, the whole thing is illogical to me. It's like rent a record to me, and i never did that either

 

My god I'm out of touch...lol.

 

It's a service model, not a product model. You're not going to the supermarket and buying a piece of fruit here and a loaf of bread there; you're buying a service that brings meals to you wherever you are, whenever you're hungry (or you're using a service like that which is supported by ads). It's really enabled by the always-on, always-connected internetworked world many of us are living in today, and the kind of power available in ubiquitous devices like cell phones, and it seems to comport with the preferred lifestyle choices of people today. It's like buying a Netflix subscription vs. buying DVDs. Does that also seem illogical to you?

 

No.
It's millenial music (in other words, crap).

 

what's a drake?

a male duck?

 

I've never listened to a Drake song, but anything that gets the Beatles fanboys this upset pleases me.

 

I wouldn't know a Drake song if one was playing

 

Well you can change the rules and have the record be broken regularly. All this guy did was release an album and all the songs hit the top of the charts. We've seen it recently from other acts too. That's a lot different than what the Beatles did. It's not even really comparable. So yes I would say there is fault for making it so easy.

 

I don't know why some Beatles fans get upset foo real because of this irrelevant record being broken by someone else. It really means nothing. I know I'm about to say something that's obvious, but, here I go anyway: they will always be remembered for their music, and not for their sales figures.

 

i understand how it works and what you're saying there.
I don't see why someone streaming a song 100 times is anything more than a count of 1 ... they chose to stream rather than purchase, and that's fine. they made a decision to stream a song, it's still a one count ... i think the mathematical process for deciding how many purchases two hundred listens is, is nonsensical. You stream a song, it counts as a purchase, you stream it fifteen thousand times, that figure doesn't change.
People often bought new release singles back in the day and ended up not necessarily liking them, but it was a purchase. Whether they played the song once and smashed it, or one thousand times and loved it is irrelevant to me, it was one purchase.

 

A standard?

 

Because from the industry's point of view, each time a user streams it it generates new revenue for the copyright holders like a new sale or a new play on a radio station. It's not as much money as a new sale, so the industry counts a certain number of streams as equivalent to a sale not 1 stream as equivalent to a sale.

 

LOL "All this guy did was release an album and all the songs hit the top of the charts."

Because that's just so easy to do. Hold on, I'm going to pull out Audacity today......stardom here I come!

 

like i say, i understand what you are saying. i just don't see it as logical.
All it means to me, is that songs in the modern era will never be able to be logically compared to songs from my dinosaur era in terms of sales, because of the methodology. Sure they can come up with a figure, but that figure is essentially a wild stab in the dark.
Now i personally don't care about that, but it seems obvious that many do.

 

I'm speaking in the context of a popular recording artist and comparing it to what the Beatles did. Easy is relative. Their songs didn't chart because people listened to their albums. They would've had a ton lot more hits if that were the case.

 

Yep and me. And no I'm not the Drake that's on the charts.

As a millenial, our music does suck. I was born too late and my Ipod is a time machine.

 

well maybe we can remedy that and get you on the charts. some dude up there says it's easy lol

not all millennial music sucks. pop music has always been a bit sucky. i only started liking 80's pop in hindsight .... and i think it is more nostalgia than anything else.

 

The charts today are not what the charts were, the singles chart is now fully corrupted. They (Billboard US, Official Charts UK) should NOT have turned the singles chart into a streaming chart, they should have left the singles chart as it was, and created a new separate streaming chart. Instead, they combined the two together and continued to call it by the same name. So we have a meaningless comparison between the singles chart of old and the one of today. TOTALLY MEANINGLESS TO COMPARE THE TWO.

The singles chart used to measure the popularity of songs issued on singles. As opposed to the albums chart measuring the popularity of songs issued on albums. Today the singles chart is measuring the popularity of songs issued on both singles and on albums. What a crock.

The solution, like I said, is separate singles and streaming charts. The UK is now limiting their singles chart to 3 tracks by the same artist. That is an improvement, but if I were in charge I'd take it down to 1 track per artist. If there were 15 songs on a just released album available to be placed on the singles chart, then pick just 1 for the single chart. That, my friends, is the best solution to maintaining the integrity of the singles chart, whereby a comparison to the past would be more valid.

2 charts, 1 singles, 1 streaming. Everyone is happy, both camps have their chart. Easy peasy, but of course that's the obvious solution, and the powers that be won't go for that...

 

exactly

 

I don't know that it's a "wild stab in the dark." People know what the revenue is from an album sale and people know what the revenue is to the various stake holders from a stream. It's not apples to apples, sure. And there may be ways to game the system -- some summarized in the Wikipedia entry on album-equivalent units, just as sure as there were ways to game the system all those years before POS measurements via SoundScan, and even those, like TV ratings, take only POS measurements from certain retailers and extrapolate out. Already stuff from 20, 25 years ago when SoundScan went in made comparisons with the numbers from the system before it not perfectly comparable. But I do think, in a general way, it provides a pretty fair look at the relative popularity of the music. And certainly more than the old days when retailers were reporting in a book what sold, the streaming numbers give you a honest count of what's being listened to. I actually think we probably have a more thorough and accurate window on what's being listened to today via these metrics than we had with the metrics of 50 years ago. And for the RIAA and it's certifications, it's 150 streams of a song that's equivalent to one paid download, I don't know if they came up with that number based on a revenue calculation, but I don't know that it's a "wild shot in the dark" either.

 

I grew up listening to music in the 1960s and 1970s. Decade-by-decade quality comparisons aside, I'm glad I had a time machine back then, too. As with books, music recording technology is a very special gift.

 

Drake should indeed be covered in cellophane.

 

probably not. it's an inside joke.