European Top 44 Airplay Chart
Back in 2006, a group of seven experienced radio-related professionals from
all over Europe gathered to find the formula to compile the European airplay
chart. It took a year to develop the software that monitored the "now
playing" information published on the radio stations' websites, and
thousands of re-calculations to calibrate the ponders that determined the
impact of each and every monitored radio station to the European listeners
(e.g. a song played by a station in Frankfurt obviously had to score more
chart "points" than when it was played by a local station on a remote Greek
island).
Although the chart calculation was
painfully slow, gathering the information from the "now playing" info from
the stations' websites had collected the data to compile a surprisingly
precise chart. Back in the day, making the "now playing" info available on
the websites was a fancy feature, more and more stations were adding it to
their websites, making the chart even more accurate.
By
the end of 2006, four out of seven founding members have left the project.
In the meantime, the chart-generating process was fully automated. The
system had been left intact, so a single PC computer forgotten in the server
room and accessed remotely from another end of the continent, continued to
publish the charts automatically.
In 2020, the project was
acquired by one of the founding members.
To be considered to be included in the European Top 44 Airplay chart, a
track must be played in a heavy-rotation on terrestrial radio in at least
three European countries.
If a radio station's stream
includes the metadata with the song information, provided that the radio
station is a terrestrial broadcaster from Europe, we will add the stream to
the monitoring list. Then, the algorithm merges the same tracks displayed in
different ways (e.g. Coldplay x BTS, Coldplay with BTS, or Coldplay &
BTS) and generates the weekly charts at the country level. The station
market size (coverage area) determines the number of chart points for each
play: a song played in Paris obviously scores more points than when it was
played on a community radio in the French Alps.
In some
countries, only a small number of stations is providing the useful metadata
information, so there is not enough data to compile the chart. In these
cases, we monitor the "now playing" information on the radio stations'
websites. Unfortunately, setting the system to monitor the now-playing info
requires the manual work for each station, so we can only monitor the major
stations on the markets with the low percentage of metadata enabled web
streams.
Even in the year of 2021, there are still some
countries where it is impossible to find a single broadcaster with a
metadata-enabled stream and/or the now playing info on the website. Although
these countries impact the overall European airplay very close to zero
level, they haven't been excluded: to provide their contribution to the
chart, we're using the information gathered from the streaming services,
with the minimized ponders.
Please note that the data-mining is
based on the publicly available metadata and "now playing" information. The
number of plays, as displayed on this website, is the number of plays
detected and counted by our platform,
not the total accurate number of plays in Europe. We may only monitor 1 out of 10 stations in a country if the remaining nine
do not send any metadata (or we were unable to find them), but our website
clearly reveals that we collect the data in real time, from the realistic
sources. Unlike some other websites, we will never fool anyone by generating
a country-level chart based on "monitoring" the stations that had gone out
of business years ago.
If you are a radio station owner, we will
gladly add your station to the monitoring list. Please
contact us with your station
information.
There is no such thing as the official European airplay chart. Unless each
and every broadcaster out there is legally required to send the accurate now
playing information to a central place, gathering the broadcast data would
have to include the detailed analog monitoring of FM airwaves. Think about
it as setting the monitoring stations in each and every major city in
Europe, with the software that tunes to the analog FM station, sends the
audio through the algorithm such as Shazam, writes the song to the database
and submits the data to the main server. We're probably talking about the
multi-million investment: thousands of computers across the continent, each
with its own costs and infrastructure... too costly to pay off, even for a
government funded project. In our opinion, the most accurate airplay
information is gathered by the entities that collect the music royalties, as
they are dealing with the data officially submitted by the radio stations.
However, in most countries, the data is submitted at the end of the month -
too late for the weekly charts.