How Global Airplay and Global Albums work
The two charts that come from logged plays, not from published charts
Almost everything on ChartFM depends on someone publishing a chart. Two charts escape that: Global Airplay and Global Albums.
Both count plays. Nobody ranks anything, nobody votes. If you connected your Last.fm account to ChartFM, what you played is already going into the count.
The window is seven days
The calculation looks at the seven days before the chart's reference day. Whatever played before that does not count, and whatever plays after goes into the next edition.
Each of the two has its own freezing time. Once an edition closes, it does not change again.
The play cap, and why it exists
Here is the part that changes the result most. Each person's plays are capped before they turn into points.
- On Airplay, up to 10 plays of the same track count per person.
- On Albums, up to 20 plays of the same album count per person, adding up all of its tracks.
Every counted play is worth 10 points. So the most one person can give a track on Airplay is 100 points, and an album on Albums is 200.
The cap exists for a simple reason: without it, whoever leaves a song on loop for two days decides the top alone. With a cap, going past the tenth play stops helping, and the only way up is having more people listening.
The bonus for a new listener
On top of the plays, each distinct person appearing on a track or an album adds 10 points once.
It is small in value and large in effect, because it pushes the ranking towards what several people played. Two people listening five times each are worth more than one person listening ten. And when two items tie on points, the one with more listeners goes ahead.
Global Albums only accepts albums
Singles and EPs stay out. The chart checks the release type in the catalogue and drops anything that is not a full album.
That is an editorial decision, not a technical limit: the chart exists to measure record listening, and a single competing with an album does not measure that. A loose track you played forty times counts on Airplay and not on Albums.
Albums are grouped by normalised title and artist, and the normaliser strips variant suffixes like deluxe, remaster and anniversary edition. People who played the deluxe version and people who played the standard one add up on the same record.
The honest limit of this
Airplay and Albums only measure people who connected Last.fm. Someone using ChartFM without connecting publishes charts, appears in the Global 100 and does not appear in these two.
So they are not a portrait of the whole community. They are a portrait of the part with logged listening, which makes them more accurate about play volume and less representative of who is on the site.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I have to do something every week?
- No. Once the account is connected, entry is automatic.
- Does playing the same song all day help?
- Up to the tenth play. After that nothing changes on Airplay, and the effort is better spent on another track.
- Why is my favourite album missing from Global Albums?
- The two common causes: it is registered as an EP or single, or its tracks were not matched in the catalogue.
