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News May 8, 2018

Post Malone smashes a Beatles chart record in the U.S. (blame streaming)

Lars Brandle
Post Malone smashes a Beatles chart record in the U.S. (blame streaming)

It’s not just in Australia where Post Malone is annihilating the charts. Postie is delivering a record-smashing, Beatles-busting effort on the U.S. Hot 100 singles chart, which is impacted by all 18 tracks from his latest album beerbongs & bentleys.

Malone sets a new chart benchmark in U.S. with the most simultaneous top 20 entries (nine) on the Hot 100, for the tally dated May 12, led by “Psycho,” featuring Ty Dolla $ign, at No. 2, while earning his first crown on the Billboard 200 with beerbongs, which establishes a new one-week streaming record.

Watch the clip for ‘Psycho’ below:

His Hot 100 record is no mean feat

With his nine top 20 hits, he ruins the previous best of six, a record co-owned by The Beatles and J. Cole. According to Billboard, The Beatles set the mark in April 1964, and held it for 54 years until J. Cole matched the effort just last week with a glut of songs from his latest hit album, K.O.D.

With “Psycho” at No. 3, “Better Now” starting at No. 7 and the global hit “Rockstar” vaulting 32-8, Malone becomes just the 18th artist to hog three simultaneous top 10s on the Hot 100.

Of course, streaming is doing most of the damage. Beerbongs shifted 461,000 equivalent album units in the week ending May 3, according to Nielsen Music, with traditional album sales accounting for some 153,000, or about a third of the total.

With each SEA unit amounting to 1,500 on-demand audio streams, beerbongs went off for an estimated 431.3 million on-demand audio streams, blitzing the previous record set in April 2017 by Drake’s More Life (384.8 million).

It’s a similar story on the ARIA Singles Chart, which is flooded this week by beerbongs songs. The U.S. singer and rapper locks up the national singles and albums chart titles and deposits 17 tracks in the Top 50 (equalling Michael Jackson’s posthumous record from July 2009), including 13 debuts (on par with Ed Sheeran’s record set in March 2017).

If the efforts of Drake, Sheeran and now Post Malone are a good indication, streaming records are just waiting to be set and toppled in this streaming age. As previously reported, Billboard has moved to tweak the methodology underpinning its flagship albums and singles charts by giving a stronger weighting to streams from paid subscriptions than those from ad-supported services or programmed platforms.

Postie’s takeover of the ARIA Charts has been met with calls for a similar rethink from music industry professionals, including Michael Parisi and Stephen Green.

Commenting on a TIO story titled ‘How do we fox the ARIA Singles chart?‘ on Facebook, Green said:

“1. We re-weight streams so the act of purchasing a track is given the credence it deserves. 2. We should include radio airplay, play in clubs and any other reliably measurable public performance situation to ensure ALL “lay back” listening is counted and not just one arbitrary method (Spotify playlists).”

:: How do we fix the singles chart?

Stream Beerbongs & Bentleys below:

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.

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