As the musical landscape continues to evolve, so do the opportunities for a new interpretation of music consumption habits. The UK Top 40 singles chart is now including video streaming figures from Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and Tidal, while streams from free and paid-for services will no longer be weighted equally. Recorded Music NZ has announced a new weekly chart that will be known as the Official Hot 40 Singles Chart. Unlike the Official Top 40 Singles Chart the Hot 40 is expected to be dynamic, with new releases likely to feature heavily.

According to Recorded Music NZ’s Chart Manager Paul Kennedy, this new chart will reflect the ‘velocity’ of songs as they gain sales, increase streams and airplay, gaining new fans and so showing signs of being the hottest new tunes of the week.

“The key question the Hot 40 Chart seeks to answer is how many more fans are interested in a track this week compared to last week? To stay in this chart, artists will need to keep gaining new fans. A song will need to keep on growing every week, making it very difficult for anything to enjoy long chart runs.”

As well as the main Hot 40 Singles Chart there will also be a version exclusive to New Zealand music – the NZ Hot 20 – in which the same principles apply. The current Top 40 international and Top 20 NZ charts will continue providing the more traditional measure of the total sales and stream volumes each week. The idea of the new methodology used to determine the Hot Charts is to provide an alternative take on what’s happening on the music scene each week. In this way global dominating acts like Ed Sheeran and local streaming kingpins like Six60 are much less likely to still occupy multiple places on the new chart six (or 60!) weeks after their album release.

It’s unclear from the press release which platforms will be used as measures and what weighting might be given to video / various streams of singles. The new Hot 40 Singles Chart will launch Friday July 6.