How our music charts work.

The joined charts add up Spotify, YouTube, Deezer, Shazam, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Melon, each country's from the ones that chart there. You'll find every chart on the list of every chart we track.

Each platform's top 100 in a country gives out points: 100 divided by the square root of the position, rounded. We add up a song's points from every platform that charts it, and the joined chart is the songs in order of their total.

A song only some of the platforms chart keeps part of its points: the square root of its share of them. On one platform in four it keeps half, on three in four 87%. One platform's chart is only that platform's listeners, so a song has to travel to get its full points.

#1

100 points

#4

50 points

#25

20 points

#100

10 points

So a song every platform plays does well: number 20 on all four platforms (88 points) beats number 1 on only one of them (50). A number one still counts for a lot: on one platform in four, it beats number 10 on two of them (44).

Spotify and Shazam publish 200 places and the others 100, so we stop at each platform's top 100. A longer chart doesn't get to hand out more points.

Platforms publish on different days. Each joined chart reads every platform's newest chart, as long as it's no more than 7 days old, rather than waiting for the slowest one.

The artist rankings use the same points. An artist gets the full points of every song they lead. Featured spots don't count, or every guest on a hit would sit at the top with its singer.

We store each chart as the platform published it: its positions, its stream or view counts where it shows them, and every title and name spelled the platform's way. Working out that a song on Spotify and a song on YouTube are the same one is a separate step that comes later. When we get a match wrong, we can redo it without losing what was published.

That's also why you can read any chart as of a past day we have. The worldwide chart goes back to Jan 1, 2017, with gaps where we don't have a platform's chart for a day.

kworb.net has published streaming chart numbers in plain tables since about 2012, and it's the site that gave us the idea. It keeps each platform on its own pages; we wanted to see them added up. If you know kworb, here's how we compare with it.

We're not affiliated with any of the platforms whose charts we show, or with kworb.net. Positions and counts are the platforms' own, as they published them.