Rolling Stone Magazine has launched its brand new music chart service. The company announced it would be diving into music charts back in May, when it unveiled its desire to expand into the industry. Now the company’s efforts have paid off and they released their first ever set of Rolling Stone Charts. The charts aim to track the popularity of songs and albums in as close to real-time as possible, updating daily.
The new Rolling Stone Charts are trying to differ away from what most people consider the typical music chart, meaning the Billboard model of releasing a new chart once a week. Deciding to update the Rolling Stone Charts daily was the company’s way of doing just that. Rolling Stone’s new music charts will take data every day to adjust and at the end of the week to determine the finalized version of the data for that week. This method allows fans to see how songs are doing on each particular day if they want, and then gives them a total placement for over the course of a week. By doing this, Rolling Stone hopes to be able to stay more current with music trends than the standard Billboard charts.
In this first set of data, Rolling Stone had 5 charts that it finalized and released rankings for. The largest two of these are the top 100 songs and top 200 albums, which mirror the albums and songs charts from Billboard. Both of these charts track from sales and streaming, unlike the other Rolling Stone Charts, which only use streaming data. On the first round of these charts, the track “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X was the number one song and Indigo by Chris Brown was the best selling album.
The other 3 lists that Rolling Stone has compiled are the Artists 500, Trending 25 and Breakthrough 25. The Artists 500 tracks which artists are getting the most streams in the US on any given day, showing on each day which artists are the most in demand. The Trending 25 tracks the 25 fastest growing songs in America. The chart is organized by which songs are gaining the most percentage of streams each day, instead of just which ones are getting the most streams over all. This lets viewers see what songs are growing in popularity whenever they want. The final chart is the Breakthrough 25, which is similar to the Trending 25, but for artists. It tracks the artists which are gaining the most streams at a given time and then also excludes artists that have ever been on the Artists 500 chart. This is in order to be sure that the artists featured on this chart are only up and coming performers.
All of these charts track data by adding together things such as physical song and album sales, digital sales, ad-supported streaming and subscription streaming and then weighing these different categories at different values. This means that, for example, a sale of a song is worth a higher amount on the chart than a stream and a stream with a subscription music service is higher than a stream through an ad-based service. The next few months will tell if these charts are going to be able to rival those from Billboard. Here is a link to the new Rolling Stone Charts.
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