How to read chart movement
What debut, re-entry, peak and weeks on chart actually mean
A list of positions on its own tells you very little. What gives a ranking meaning is the comparison with last week. That is why music charts invented, decades ago, the grammar of arrows and numbers that ChartFM still uses.
This piece explains each indicator and, more importantly, what each one usually means in practice.
The five states of a song
Every song on a chart sits in one of five states:
- Debut. The song has never appeared on that chart before. This is its first week.
- Up. It sat in a worse position last week. The number beside the arrow says how many places it gained.
- Down. It sat in a better position. The number says how many places it lost.
- Steady. It is in exactly the same position as last week.
- Re-entry. The song was on the chart before, dropped out, and has now returned. This differs from a debut, and the difference matters.
Re-entry is the most interesting of the five. It almost always has an external cause: an artist came back into circulation, a film used the track, somebody wrote about the record and the community went back to it.
Peak and weeks: a song's memory
Two numbers follow a song through its entire life on the chart.
The peak is the best position it ever reached. It gives context to the current position. A song at number ten with a peak of one is falling from a long run. A song at number ten with a peak of ten is having the best moment of its life. Same position, opposite story.
Weeks count how many times the song has appeared on the chart, adding up every spell. It measures staying power. A track that spends twenty weeks on someone's personal chart says more about that person than any score could.
How to read a fall
A steep fall does not mean the song got worse. In rankings driven by votes, dropping twenty places usually means other songs climbed hard, not that this one lost its appeal.
This happens intensely in release weeks. When a long-awaited record lands, it takes several positions at once and pushes everything else down. That week's falls say more about the release than about the songs that fell.
The more useful reading compares the fall against the peak and the weeks. A song with a high peak and many weeks that falls slowly is closing a long cycle. A song that debuts high and drops twenty places the next week had a spike of curiosity, not of affection.
On the Global 100 the reading shifts
The Global 100 is not one person's chart, it is the sum of all of them. That changes what the numbers mean.
There, each song also carries the number of charts it appeared on and the total points it scored. Together those two reveal something the position hides: if a track appears on few charts but always in high positions, it has a small and intense audience. If it appears on many charts in middling positions, it has broad reach and low devotion.
Both situations can produce the same points and the same position. Only the chart count shows the difference.
Frequently asked questions
- Why can a song debut straight at number one?
- Because the position depends only on that week's points. If enough people put the same track at the top of their own chart, it debuts at the top of the Global 100. There is no waiting period.
- What is the difference between a debut and a re-entry?
- A debut is the first appearance in that chart's history. A re-entry is a return after dropping out. ChartFM keeps the history, so it can tell them apart.
- Can a peak get worse?
- No. The peak is the best position ever reached and it never moves backwards. If a song hit number three once, its peak is three forever, even if it never passes twenty again.
