[tellyblues]

A stream doesn't count the same as one bought for download or physical single. It's 100 streams to 1 sale for the least amount of effort. It's not ideal but it's a far more accurate system to what's popular than a purely sales chart.

It's not even that because they have different stream to sale ratios for things like older records, "songs in decline" and a limit on how many songs an artist can have in the charts at once (after Ed Sheeran kept taking the entire top 10 every time he released an album), so it really isn't representative of anything any more.

There has to be certain rules in place otherwise the industry would be at a standstill, for example, record companies not knowing when to push new artists because they don't know if/when they are going to chart. They could ask the OCC to exclude other artists on their books to allow the newer artists to chart but that would be unfair to established artists. Or they could do what happened in the old days and make records go out of print by taking down songs online. Either option is overkill and would lead to accusations of the charts being rigged. Not that they aren't manipulated to some extent with playlists but no-one is being forced to do anything and the current system is the fairest solution for all whilst making the charts appear credible and relevant.

I think if they were hypothetically to bring back a version of TOTP, it might be better to base it around the album charts, which is what the French version did when that was a thing circa 2003.

The album charts aren't much better because single tracks if streamed enough count towards sales of an album. Have a show which namechecks Elton John and Abba every week and people will start to question things. On the other hand, a show without a chart element won't work because people having a good time isn't a strong enough format.