Do Music Charts Still Matter? [Upward Spiral Deep Dive #3]

The question of what music charts should count has defined a debate in the music industry that has been going on for several years. Because what gets counted — i.e. what data gets included and weighted in a chart — determines what artists are praised as “successful.” Most recently, a controversy erupted around the Jay Z and Samsung partnership because Billboard decided that it would not count the album downloads offered through a mobile app. One million copies of “Magna Carta Holy Grail” were omitted from their stats on the album. This issue and many others are discussed on this Deep Dive podcast with Soundrop’s Cortney Harding.