How to build your first weekly chart
A guide for anyone who has never ranked their own favourite songs
A chart on ChartFM is your personal ranking for the week. You pick the songs you played most, or liked most, over the last seven days and decide their order. There is no official criterion, no jury, and nobody is going to correct your list.
Even so, the charts that are good to follow tend to share a few habits. This guide collects what usually works.
Start with the size
The first decision is how many positions your chart will have. Ten is the most common and the easiest to keep up. Twenty already demands that you pay attention to what you listened to during the week. Fifty is for people who enjoy watching the long tail of their own taste move around.
Size does not change the value of a chart, but it changes the experience. A chart of ten has high turnover and every new entry is an event. A chart of fifty has a stable base at the bottom and movement only near the top.
If you are unsure, start with ten. Growing later is easy. Cutting hurts.
Decide what you are measuring
Here is the choice that changes the result most, and the one almost nobody makes consciously: are you measuring what you played most, or what you liked most?
Both answers are valid and they produce different charts.
- If you measure plays, your chart becomes an honest snapshot of the week. The song that got stuck in your head and you repeated twenty times will sit near the top, even if you would not defend it in public.
- If you measure taste, your chart becomes curation. The difficult record you played twice with full attention can beat the hit that ran in the background all day.
Plenty of people mix the two without noticing and then get annoyed at their own list. Choosing in advance solves it.
Order by comparison, not by score
The temptation is to score every song and sort by the number. It works badly. Scores pile up into ties and you end up with seven songs worth eight out of ten and no order between them.
The method that works better is comparing in pairs. Take two songs and ask which one you would choose if you could only hear one. Repeat. The order appears on its own, and it tends to be truer to what you actually feel than any score.
Do not force novelty
There is a quiet pressure to make the chart change every week. If the same song has held your number one for a month, leave it there. A song that holds the top for six weeks tells a better story than six different songs across six weeks.
ChartFM records how many weeks each song spent on your chart and what its peak was. Those numbers only get interesting if you are honest about the order.
What happens after you publish
Your chart counts towards the Global 100, the community's overall ranking. Each position hands out points, and the higher the placement, the more points the song receives. Adding up every chart published that week forms the ranking.
That means your chart carries real weight even if nobody reads it directly. It changes the collective result.
On top of that, the following week ChartFM compares your new chart against the previous one and works out what climbed, what fell, what debuted and what dropped out. That comparison only exists if you publish with some regularity.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I have to publish every week?
- No. Nothing breaks if you skip a week. But week to week movement gets more interesting the more continuous your history is, and your run of published weeks shows on your profile.
- Can I repeat the same song across several weeks?
- Yes, and it is expected. A good song does not leave your head in seven days.
- Is it fine to include old songs?
- It is. The chart is about what you listened to that week, not about what was released that week. A record from 1994 can dominate your chart with no problem at all.
- What if I regret the order?
- You can edit the chart while the week is still open. Once the week is consolidated, the chart stays on record as published, because the Global 100 has already counted its points.
