By | Published on Wednesday 2 May 2018
Having said that, only those streams consumed within the United States count towards an album being certified, so not every YouTube view or Spotify play is included. The live stream count updates every 2 seconds to reflect the total number of streams. After the first 7 days, your stats update once a day at approximately 3 PM EST. For more info on this, check out How often are my stats updated in Spotify for Artists? On the web: See the live stream count on your song stats. On the mobile app.
Billboard has confirmed details of its impending chart policy revamp. The trade mag and its best buds over at stats firm Nielsen are changing how they count streams when compiling the various American music charts.
Basically paid-for streams are going to be worth more than free streams when it comes to said charts because – well – mainly because Jimmy Iovine had a moan, I think. I mean, imagine a free Spotify stream having as much weight in the charts as a paid-for Apple stream!
The shift to streaming has created all sorts of challenges for chart compilers. First, how to mix streams in with CD and download sales. And then secondly, how to combine data from the different kinds of streaming platforms, including free, paid-for, on-demand, personalised radio and user-upload sites.
/spotify-ipod-cord-concept-5806f9c83df78cbc28b145ce.jpg "Do Spotify Free Streams Count")
Chart overseers in different countries have gone with different approaches, none of which are entirely satisfactory. Though, at the end of the day, the music charts are just a marketing platform really (and/or a means for point scoring within the industry), so no one should really lose too much sleep over the quirks and limitations in any one chart’s methodology.
Billboard confirmed last year that it was planning a rejig to make premium streams more influential in its musical lists. More details have now been revealed. Billboard’s main singles chart, the Hot 100, which was already confusing because it has long included radio airplay data alongside sales figures, will continue to count streams on most platforms, but from July there’ll be a points system depending on how the stream was accessed.
Explains Billboard: “[The chart] will have multiple weighted tiers of streaming plays for the Hot 100, which take into account paid subscription streams (representing a full point value per play), ad-supported streams (representing a 2/3-point value per play) and programmed streams (representing a 1/2-point value per play). Those values are then applied to the chart’s formula alongside all-genre radio airplay and digital song sales data”.
On the main albums chart, the Hot 200, you have the additional challenge of equating track streams with album sales. In that countdown, Billboard says: “[This chart] will now include two tiers of on-demand audio streams. Tier 1: paid subscription audio streams (equating 1,250 streams to 1 album unit) and Tier 2: ad-supported audio streams (equating 3,750 streams to 1 album unit)”.
A further review of all this musical counting will be conducted later this year, with plans already in the pipeline to add a further distinction – between fully-on-demand and partially on-demand premium streams – in 2019. Yay maths!
Welcome to the Spotify streaming numbers tool! We are very happy to offer you this incredibly efficient tool that gives you your favorite artist’s streams in one click only.
We wouldn’t have been able to achieve this without the great Spotify API and the amazing github project of evilarceus. If the latter happens to meet our page, we would be really glad to get in touch and thank him personally.
As Spotify doesn’t directly provide streaming numbers on its API, they can require us to shut down this tool anytime. They are transparent enough with their data that we can hardly blame them if that happens. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Naturally, we tried to make it the least technical that we could so that everyone can enjoy it. If you face any difficulty, please read the FAQ below. For any further request or suggestion please use the comments section.
1) Is it possible to fetch any artist?Yes. We are directly hitting Spotify’s API. All artists available in their database can be fetched, including artists who are currently unavailable for streaming.
2) I typed in the name but no result is found, why?Since many artists use similar names or even special characters, the query by name can miss the artist you are looking for. In this case, we suggest to use the search by ID that works for every artist.
3) Where can I find the ID of an artist?From Google you can search an artist name plus “Spotify”. The first result will always be the artist page on Spotify. There, all 22 characters after “artist/” inside the URL reflects the artist id.
Here the example of Adele, with her id being 4dpARuHxo51G3z768sgnrY.
Yes, all streaming data are up to date. As they are retrieved from Spotify’s database itself, they are automatically refreshed every day.
5) I selected albums, singles and compilations but some are missing, why?Spotify API limits queries to 100 albums, 50 singles and 50 compilations. Artists with heavy discographies and/or albums with many versions may have more records listed under these three sections. If that happens, we suggest you to search the artist one format at a time.
6) I noticed that one song is missing, why?Spotify has many versions of each song and album, way more than often displayed in frontend. They often have slight alterations on their name.
In order to avoid flooding you with a lot of duplicated data and displaying messy totals, we took the decision to deduplicate lines based on the number of streams. If two distinct songs happen to have the exact same number of streams at some point, for that day the oldest song only will be displayed.
As we deduplicate songs to prevent us from double counting, tracks which appear in several sections (album, single, compilation) will appear only in the first one, which may lead to incomplete tracklists for compilations or singles.
8) Can I search for songs which are only available under the “Appears on” section?Sadly, the answer at the moment is no. We have a solution to retrieve this data, but it requires an exponential number of requests to the Spotify API. This would greatly slow down this tool. For this reason, this option has been removed so far.
9) What does EAS stand for?EAS stands for Equivalent Album Sales. As streaming is rapidly replacing paid-for sales, the industry standard is to convert these numbers into equivalent album sales. To understand how we convert streams in EAS at Chartmasters, please follow this link.
How To Check Spotify Streams
10) What is the conversion formula for EAS?The conversion formula is Spotify streams * (310/207) / 1500.
The 310/207 ratio extrapolates Spotify streams into market-comprehensive numbers for occidental markets, simulating results on platforms like Apple Music, Amazon Music and Deezer.
The 1,500 division factor reflects the industry-accepted ratio between 1 album sale and 1,500 streams.
You can read more about format conversions with explanations on our Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept.
Spotify Plays Free
As any automatic program, this formula misses manual adjustments. In Sweden for example, Spotify accounts for over 90% of the market, so local albums are inflated by the 310/207 calculation.
Opposite to Sweden, Spotify’s market share in terms of gross revenue is only 25.2% in France, so the average formula will typically downgrade French language releases.
All in all, the formula is relevant primarily to international singers.
Due to the heavy growth of the usage of this tool, our technical environment struggles to handle this activity.
We are still working on a long-term solution to keep this service alive, to improve its stability and to add some functionalities.
In the meantime, a temporary solution has been implemented so that you can use this tool anew!