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YouTube brings its trending charts to the YouTube Music app

YouTube brings its trending charts to the YouTube Music app

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Image: YouTube

YouTube has announced that its YouTube Music Charts will now be integrated within the YouTube Music app on users’ home screens, and they will be available through search. Previously, these charts were only parked and viewable at a separate domain.

Charts should be available in the YouTube Music app starting today. All 29 markets YouTube Music is available in will get five charts playlists: three specific to their country and two global lists. Users can then add charts they like to their library so they can stay up to date on trending material.

The charts, updated weekly, have been around for some time and were last revamped in May of this year. They show what’s trending both locally (by country) and overall across the platform in categories like Top Songs and Top Music Videos. The charts not only show the current position of an artist, song, or video, but whether it’s moved up or down in position since the previous chart. Each chart is also packaged into playlists.

YouTube claims its charts are “more accurate” than Billboard’s

The Trending chart is particularly interesting; back in May, YouTube said it was the company’s “first dedicated external signal of the most viewed new music on the platform.” Stephen Bryan, YouTube’s head of label relations claimed in an interview with Rolling Stone that YouTube charts are “more accurate” than Billboard’s charts, with greater representation from Latin and hip-hop acts.

Earlier this year, Billboard changed how streams are weighted on its charts, devaluing YouTube’s ad-supported music streams in comparison to streams from paid services like Apple Music and Spotify. YouTube launched its charts just 10 days after Billboard’s announcement, but it insisted it wasn’t because Billboard gave it a back seat. YouTube is already the biggest music streaming platform on the internet, and now the company is looking to use these charts to bring weight to YouTube as an accurate marker for what’s relevant in the moment.

Offering up lists at the highest level like Top Songs probably won’t provide much for users in terms of discovery since there’s no further breakdown into genre or anything else, but having the charts be more visible could help solidify the meaningfulness of having something chart on YouTube for the music industry at large. Candice Morrissey, the previous head of music partnerships for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) at YouTube, told Musically earlier this year that its charts are “interesting for the industry. We see our charts as being very complementary to the existing official charts [in multiple markets].”