This week we have lived an historic event, BTS has beaten all records on the release day of ‘Dynamite’. They have succeed on all platforms, on YouTube, the Corean group has surpassed a 100 million of views in 24 hours, beating the all-time record. On Spotify, it has also been the best release day for a song, at least of this year 2020, with 7,778,950 streams according to the official chart of Spotify.
Then, which is the problem? Well, the problem is that there is a huge difference between the almost 8 million streams that positioned the track at the top of the Spotify Global Chart and the more than 12 million streams that the track amassed on the same day according to the streaming platform.
There are over 4 million streams that would not count for the track to be featured in the chart. Why? According to what Spotify explains on its web, this difference would exist because of the formula they use to avoid any ‘artificial inflation of chart positions’. Therefore, anyone could deduce, those 4 million streams that do not appear on the chart figures are… artificial? However, they do count on the global count of streams on the BTS’s profile.
This is not the first time something like this happens with a relevant artist, it also happened with ‘7 Rings’ by Ariana Grande in 2019.
It is well known that the army of BTS fans, as they like to be called, would do anything they could to guarantee the success of their idols, anything, including listening to the song over and over again during the first 24 hours of its release. In fact, on Social Networks, there were many fans accounts that were asking people to keep on listening to the track in order to achieve a great amount of plays on the release day. It seems, this is something that Spotify would understand as ‘artificial inflation of streams’.
However, it is interesting to question how Spotify and its formula can really count which streams are due to real interest and which due to admiration towards the group. Also, why some streams are valid for the charts and some other are not.
All this controversy also makes people wonder if the streams and views nowadays are realistic data that expresses the success or not of a song or if they are simply one action more of the marketing campaign that supports the track.