Reviewing The ARIA Charts: The New Changes Revealed

It must have been a nervous week for ARIA, realising that the week they’d chosen a few months ago to debut their new chart rules were going to be obscured by a K-Pop phenomenon AND a Sabrina Carpenter album all in the one week. When ARIA’s publicist pretended we were stupid and said that it wasn’t technically possible to provide the chart an hour or two early under embargo, I figured there may be som nerves that the singles chart might be looking about as dishevelled as I am after being forced to write after 5pm Friday despite a week of BIGSOUND to sleep off.

So how do these new charts look? The main game is the ARIA Singles Chart. After over a year of testing, it was decided that nothing would be done about multiple entries from one album and this was the wrong week to sweep that decision under the carpet. Twenty of the top fifty singles are from either the Sabrina Carpenter album or K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack.

That quirk also gives Universal a massive 68% of the top 50 chart, with Warner taking 26%. Sony has just two songs in the top 50 with Shaboozey giving one place for indies. Unfortunately, zero Australian singles made the cut.

We’ve said goodbye to The Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris, Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams and Zach Bryan’s Something In The Orange, although its likely the Sabrina onslaught would have taken care of some of those anyway this particular week.

So the result of the new chart rules? Not much. The chart isn’t particularly useful for anyone trying to decipher a range of popular songs, but it’s no worse than it would have been last week before the changes.

Over on the albums chart, the real impacts of the changes are being seen. There’s a huge twenty-eight new and re-entries as a swathe of vintage greatest hits records are swept across into the ARIA “On Replay” charts. It’s clearly a great change for new music and that includes Aussies as The Wolfe Brothers score a top ten and Hayley Jensen hits the top twenty— amazing results for Australian country.

There’s also great signs for artists who would otherwise have had a huge debut and then big drop in the second week. Royel Otis’ drop from last week’s #5 is to #18, a far better result than we’re used to from post-debut albums.

As ARIA warned, the rule changes aren’t a panacea for Australian music, the albums moving up the charts are largely international, with just five of the top fifty from Australia. Still, this is a result far better than we’re used to and it’s clear that as far as the albums chart goes, the rule changes while modest, have had a positive impact.

On the Australian artist singles chart, the real benefits of the rule changes are being seen. Instead of Crowded House having yet another week at #1, we’re seeing Keli Holiday’s banger Dancing2 hitting #1. Sure, it would be better to have this kind of result on the overall chart, but the visibility it gives a track like this is an important step towards achieving that. This is a track the whole industry should be getting behind and this kind of chart visibility will help that motivation.

The chart still shows an industry unable to come to terms with its own under investments, with multiple entries from The Kid Laroi, Royel Otis, Cyril and Dom Dolla taking up spots where a more healthy spread of new hits vying for the top spot would be preferable, but there’s now space for OneFour, Ocean Alley and Tame Impala that wasn’t there before.

As we saw on the overall albums chart, the benefit in the rules for The Wolfe Brothers and Hayley Jensen flow over to the Australian albums chart. It’s a much better spread of albums that are genuinely finding audiences. Albums from Swanee, The Bamboos, Spacey Jane, Bleak Squad and so many more will now have multiple weeks of visibility. We can see things like James Johnston’s ‘Raised Like That’ still in a good chart position, showing the previously invisible longevity of the record and it’s the kind of story the chart rules will now reveal each week.

The changes have also been great on the genre charts. The country albums chart looks geniunely dynamic for the first time in a decade or more. The dance and hip hop charts look indicative of what’s actually happening rather than a stagnant pond of near-term nostalgia. The Australian genre charts are even more exciting, giving artists who would never have had a look in a way to rank themselves rather than being kept out by the Best of Slim Dusty and the entire Hilltop Hoods catalogue. The choice to also roll the changes out to these was wise.

Ironically, the chart changes made to shine a light on new music have also created what is a pretty cool new chart for nostalgia fans. For anyone that loved the Hottest 100 Australian songs of all time, the Top 50 On Replay Australian Singles Chart is a new dynamic list just begging for its own playlist. No doubt ARIA sponsors Spotify will be already all over that.

The On Replay Australian Albums chart is also pretty cool. Would you have guessed the Jungle Giants would be in there with Vance Joy and AC/DC? This is new visibility on Australian history that we didn’t have before and whether its radio programmers, playlisters or just nerds like me, the charts actually do what they were always supposed to: give valuable data that can shortcut decisions that help the rise of new music, both for the industry and the public.

In some ways, the “unfortunate” timing of the launch with Sabrina Carpenter and K-Pop Demon Hunters shows what ARIA have said all along and actually helps the case for more change. Today’s tweaks are a first step, they aren’t the last step. It’s pretty clear with the positive change on MOST of the charts, that having ten tracks from one album in the charts isn’t helping anyone (except in this case Universal) and pressure is likely to build on that for the next round of changes.

The addition of radio data and other broader consumption data could also impact that, but what the positive changes that we can now see in the genre charts and album charts will do is to prove that changes can be made and the sky won’t fall. ARIA have proven that they can manage the changes well and while there’s always going to be arguments that it hasn’t gone far enough, the charts we have this week are far and away better than the ones we had last week.

If the narrative from this week’s charts are that Sabrina Carpenter is huge, The Wolfe Brothers and Hayley Jensen are worthy of your attention and Keli Holiday is on its way to being a breakout hit, we’re in a pretty good place. Maybe it’s my overwhelming positivity from the week at BIGSOUND meeting with my delerious weariness, but the reality of the chart changes are even better than the academia. The rescue of Australia’s domestic music consumption locally will be the product of many small changes and this one feels important.

Now let’s shut up and get Keli Holiday to #1. On the real chart.