Sam Fender and Olivia Dean - Rein Me In

It's the same flaw that's keeping Lush Life in the top 20 forever, which is even more tiresome than Rein Me In having already had its moment. I think we'll see it happening more and more often.

At this point, we can talk about do the sharts needs another rule change. But at what point do you tinker with so many rules that the sharts stop representing anything meaningful?



I actually would suggest that rather than any more tinkering, we instead accept the charts don't serve a purpose any more and RETIRE them. If it's no longer a useful promotional tool, then it's just a financial overhead. And maybe without the charts, Taylor Swift will ease off the cynically timed remixes and special editions, and the world will be a better place.
LET ZARA LARSSON HAVE HER DUE RECOGNITION FROM POPULAR CULTURE :oi:
 
LET ZARA LARSSON HAVE HER DUE RECOGNITION FROM POPULAR CULTURE :oi:

Well yes but can't they all stream the FAR SUPERIOR and TOLERABLE Midnight Sun instead?

I never need to hear Lush Life again in my life
 
Reign at number one ENDS, replaced by that lovely listenable (but broadly unremarkable) new Ariana Grande record.
 
Just to piss Moopy off

Sir Fender is playing Taylor Swift at her own evil games, and has rushed out a special edition vinyl to dethrone her. Forecast to replace her at #1 again this week

It would be the fifth longest running #1 of all time

REAL HINGED MUSIK UP
 
If that sales increase is as the result of sales rather than streams, it doesn't move it out of ACR, does it?
 
Then Taylor Swift will truly have been stopped and we can all have cake to celebrate
 
#1 again

And now only beaten by the Mariah and Pogues Christmas tracks for the most weeks in the top 10 of all time (this is the 37th)
 
Number one in the UK for a sixteenth week, making it the longest running number one by British artists ever.
 
It's been a long time coming but this song's run at number 1 really does feel like the final nail in the coffin for any relevance the charts ever had.
 
I don't really see why this is the marker of it over anything else. Were the charts more or less relevant when the 1000th number one was Elvis reissues?
 
It's been a long time coming but this song's run at number 1 really does feel like the final nail in the coffin for any relevance the charts ever had.

Whilst I agree the sharts aren't a particularly useful barometer for anything these days, Fender isn't the trigger. We would have the same moans years ago when Drake got 15 weeks with "One Dance" or when Sheeran blocked out the entire chart with one album release.

They've been DEAD FOR A DECADE
 
Yes, it's amazing how the internet is basically THE WHOLE WORLD at your fingertips, but it's too much. Our human nature seeks what we know and are comfortable with, and despite having all the availability, you end end up seeing less of it because there's no omnipotence telling you what to consume. Our free will dictates us to stay comfortable, stay in our echo chambers, and enjoy it. There's probably an arguement in there about why extreme politics on both sides has seen a resurgence recently...
wow-cry.gif
 
Whilst I agree the sharts aren't a particularly useful barometer for anything these days, Fender isn't the trigger. We would have the same moans years ago when Drake got 15 weeks with "One Dance" or when Sheeran blocked out the entire chart with one album release.

They've been DEAD FOR A DECADE
Maybe I'm speaking from a personal experience. The thing that makes this different for me, is that this song is SO OLD. At least Drake and Sheeran were new releases that over stayed their welcome. This has been out for what a year now?! There is just no appetite for new music any more. I reckon maybe 2 or 3 songs in the top 40 of the year so far are 2026 releases. And that IS different to when Sheeran and Drake were pissing me off.
 
It is actually an interesting point. I kind of wonder if it's just the unavoidable shift that more explicitly shows what was probably always the case - that stuff usually takes a fair bit longer to percolate than just the week it's released (and obviously culture's a lot more siloed and less 'five channels and three radio stations that most people follow that tell you what's new and what to listen).

Back in the day it probably showed up a lot more in people just buying the album rather than the single if they caught on quite late, and then playing it off that. Now everyone just streams the track once they stumble on it.
 
I do think we've reached a point of extreme laziness in our consumption of art - not just music but film and TV too.

it goes beyond the natural time it takes new music to enter the general consciousness (I think that's kinda rubbish anyway - we've known so many songs explode out of the gate in the streaming era and become immediately huge, and even on other metrics a new song can be top 5 on UK radio within a week).

it feels more like a point of total stagnation in culture. there are very few original films being made on a big budget. everything is a reboot or sequel or nostalgia bait. songs from 20+ years ago consistently dominate streaming. very little is breaking through.

I'd point to myriad reasons including:

a streamlining of culture indicating that we like to consume bland things that are not challenging, making it harder for new music to stand out in a sea of the familiar.

a nostalgia for the 90s and 00s that never seems to reach a tipping point - maybe because a lot of people aged between ~30-50 know life was better then in many ways.

the proliferation of AI music thrown out on Spotify etc in massive numbers has probably been more impactful than we realise - top 10 daily streams are way down but overall streams/subscribers are not, which probably means a lot of AI music is being consumed from playlists and autoplay.

people have become very lazy. nobody wants to think for themselves if at all avoidable. don't underestimate how many people just hit play on a song and then let Spotify choose for them all day long.

it will be interesting to see if this is just a momentary thing or a blip, or whether it gets worse.
 
I do think we've reached a point of extreme laziness in our consumption of art - not just music but film and TV too.

it goes beyond the natural time it takes new music to enter the general consciousness (I think that's kinda rubbish anyway - we've known so many songs explode out of the gate in the streaming era and become immediately huge, and even on other metrics a new song can be top 5 on UK radio within a week).

it feels more like a point of total stagnation in culture. there are very few original films being made on a big budget. everything is a reboot or sequel or nostalgia bait. songs from 20+ years ago consistently dominate streaming. very little is breaking through.

I'd point to myriad reasons including:

a streamlining of culture indicating that we like to consume bland things that are not challenging, making it harder for new music to stand out in a sea of the familiar.

a nostalgia for the 90s and 00s that never seems to reach a tipping point - maybe because a lot of people aged between ~30-50 know life was better then in many ways.

the proliferation of AI music thrown out on Spotify etc in massive numbers has probably been more impactful than we realise - top 10 daily streams are way down but overall streams/subscribers are not, which probably means a lot of AI music is being consumed from playlists and autoplay.

people have become very lazy. nobody wants to think for themselves if at all avoidable. don't underestimate how many people just hit play on a song and then let Spotify choose for them all day long.

it will be interesting to see if this is just a momentary thing or a blip, or whether it gets worse.
Nail on head. I never let apple music choose my music for me, but I guess I'm the minority. Sigh.
 
I still don't think listener behaviour is that different to previous decades - not in terms of how we listen but what we listen to. If streaming existed in the 80s, The Police would have been number one for 16 weeks, the charts would have been full of songs by Beatles and Elvis and Perry Como and the likes of Madonna and Whitney Houston wouldn't have even got off the starting blocks.

The charts were way more important then, they bear little relevance now - their own undoing. But if they want to continue having charts, they need to address the issues we've talked about many times. The charts were created as another platform to promote new music. That need has passed and the labels don't seem concerned about it. I don't understand why, as you can only do so much with royalties for Fleetwood Mac versus royalties for a new superstar, but for whatever reason, it doesn't seem like anyone has any hunger to fix it.
 
I also don't think the mass general public are any more or less lazy than before. If anything, organic listening and discovery has increased with platforms like Spotify, although only maybe with the top echelon of music fans - like those of us on moopy. Where pre-generated playlist for the masses exist now, so did radio and MTV then.
 
I think Madonna and Whitney would have still broken through, but it might have been a lot more of a slog. When a label really backs an artist now - thinking of the likes of Olivia Rodrigo - it still seems to happen. But those breakthroughs are much fewer and more far between, and there are just as many cases like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan that seem to involve really plugging away just below the radar for a long time before managing to finally hit big.
 
Hell - Olivia Dean and RAYE seem like pretty good examples of that too. They definitely had a lot of industry/BBC promo for a fair while before they actually had their moment where they had proper hits. Memory doesn't serve but I feel like Sam Fender got fairly well known in his lane straight out the gate, though obviously it took until Seventeen Going Under before randomers on the street might have heard of him.
 
It’s the way the chart is calculated, it really is as simple as that.

Previously a chart hit was determined by enough people actively liking something enough to walk to a shop and part money with it. You could have a top ten, even a multi-week #1 by capturing the attention of a remarkably small percentage of the population.

Streaming is far more accurate but it’s so much about passive listening. My friends and I are all big music fans in varying ways, yet last month we all went away together and what ended up playing in the background for half the night? Olivia Dean’s album, because somehow it came on and it’s totally likable and inoffensive so nobody felt the need to change it.

If streaming had existed in 1996 the Spice Girls would have 2-3 #1s at most and Oasis would have about 20.

There seems to be an argument - or at least an acceptance that this new chart landscape is more democratic or genuinely representative than previous models, so there’s no justification for changing it. And to be fair, it did tip too far in the other direction when the bottom fell out of the physical market around 2005 and a small group of Elvis Presley fanatics essentially held the charts to ransom for a year.

But there needs to be some form of course correction. I don’t want or need the charts to represent an accurate sampling of what the vast majority of the population is half-listening to. Bring back niche hits and dynamism.
 
Last edited:
The singles chart is silly! Rather than accepting that the way music is consumed has changed and just creating a new chart for streaming and letting the singles chart become a relic, they tried to retro-fit streaming into the old model and created a MONSTER.

Now it's half "what are people buying?" and half "what are people listening to?", but with silly little rules and down weights applied to streaming to make it fit the logic of a sales-based chart, so it's not a true representation of what people are listening to anyway. The longer it goes on, and the more the music industry changes, the more strange rules they have to add to their algorithmic working to keep the simulacrum alive.
 
Exactly! It’s always been something of a farce, so there’s really no excuse not to at least make it fun and interesting!
 
And there'll of course be more chart RIDICULOUSNESS to come

It's apparantly one week off the fearful "ACR" so we'll get the ludicrous scenario of a 16 week #1 suddenly plummeting 1-22
 
Increased sales this week, so not only is it still #1 (with a 14k lead), but it's also now free of the dreaded ACR for another three weeks :D

It's nearest rivals were football related songs, so it hitting 20 weeks isn't beyond the realms...

Moopy AGHAST
 
I honestly think it would be true to what the UK is now for this to become the longest running #1. Just as America has got All I Want For Christmas Is You crossed with Shaboozey
 
Based on total weeks it's now the most successful in terms of chart topping longevity.

1000058602.jpg
 
Was it Bryan Adams or Wet Wet that was basically discontinued at the request of the artist? They could have gone on for longer but they were worried about backlash or something.
 
And does Bryan Adams still hold the record for the most consecutive weeks? I believe Sam and Frankie's record are both as a result of multiple runs, no?
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom