How the charts are calculated
Every chart edition can be traced back to the observations, scoring rules and scoring version used to make it. Rankings are never set by public votes, submissions or payment.
Tracking week
Charts cover a seven-day tracking week starting Friday 00:00 UTC. Editions are calculated after the week closes, checked automatically, reviewed by an editor and then published. Published editions are never edited. If a correction is needed we publish a new revision and say so on the chart.
Hitboard 50
Each source is first turned into a 0–100 signal, so values from different platforms can be compared:
- YouTube: views gained during the week (not lifetime views), summed across a song's verified official uploads (official video, lyric video, official audio), then converted to a percentile among tracked songs.
- Apple Music: daily chart position in each tracked territory, scored as
100 × (M − rank) / (M − 1)for a chart of size M. We take the best territory each day and average over the days the feed was available. A song missing from a feed we did retrieve scores 0 that day.
| Signal | Weight |
|---|---|
| YouTube views gained this week | 60% |
| Apple Music chart positions | 40% |
Missing data is not zero. If a source is unavailable for a song, for example during a platform outage, its weight is redistributed over the sources we do have. A song is eligible only if sources worth at least 60% of the weight contributed, so YouTube data is currently required. Observations more than 36 hours from the week boundaries are treated as missing.
Ties are broken by source_coverage desc, then youtube signal desc, then song id asc.
Hitboard Rising 10
Rising 10 measures momentum, not size. It combines three signals, each converted to a percentile among eligible songs:
| Signal | What it measures | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | Smoothed log change in weekly views vs the previous week | 50% |
| Acceleration | Is growth speeding up compared with the week before? | 30% |
| Consistency | Share of days that beat last week's daily average | 20% |
To be eligible a song needs at least 5,000 views this week, a previous-week baseline, and positive growth. Songs in the Hitboard 50 top 10 and songs released during the week are left out; debuts appear on New Releases and in the Hitboard 50 instead. If fewer than ten songs qualify, the chart is shorter. We don't pad it.
Hitboard Top 20
The top 20 positions of the Hitboard 50 for the same week.
Checks before publishing
Each draft is checked for unique, consecutive ranks; duplicate songs; scores in range; source coverage; unresolved artists; and movement, peak and weeks-on-chart that agree with history. Unusual patterns, such as a jump of 25 or more places, a debut in the top five, many identical scores, or a stale data source, are flagged for an editor to investigate. A flag is not proof of manipulation.
What we don't do
- We don't estimate streams or listener counts that sources don't publish.
- We don't sell chart positions. Sponsored content is always labelled and never affects rankings.
- Artist and label submissions help us discover songs; they never raise a ranking.
Current scoring versions: popularity/v1, momentum/v1.