Top of the flops: is streaming rendering the charts obsolete?

Record companies might disagree, but exclusives, eligibility algorithms, bundling and ‘streaming farms’ are threatening to ruin the Top 40

The singles charts have always been a bit of a shambles, but recently they have been upgraded to “hot mess” status. Take Ellie Goulding scoring the post-Christmas No 1 with her cover of Joni Mitchell’s River, despite it being an Amazon exclusive, through a combination of playlist carpet-bombing and the season’s perennial heavy hitters from Wham! and Mariah Carey having their eligible streaming numbers effectively halved to stop tracks more than three years old clogging the chart arteries.

It is not only the UK facing a chart crisis. In the US, French Montana’s Writing on the Wall has become a surprise hit amid accusations of industrialised fake streaming, where stream “farms” have thousands of devices hammering the first 31 seconds of a track on Spotify or YouTube so they get registered as a play.