Talk:List of artists who have spent the most weeks on the UK music charts

Albums and singles?
I have the book this article is based on and I'm fairly sure the order given in the book is only based on the album chart.  McLerristarr &#124;  Mclay1  09:47, 23 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Wait, no, I look it up and I'm wrong. Never mind.  McLerristarr &#124;  Mclay1  09:48, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

New list 2015
I've removed the old defunct and unformatted list from 2006 and replaced with updated figures from OCC. This is still kind of original research (like the old list which manually added a year onto a Guinness list) but at least it's up to date. If anybody can find any sources talking about an artist's combined weeks on the singles and albums charts that would be great, if not, well, it's up to the consensus whether we keep this or not. Btljs (talk) 09:13, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Almost there
900s combined

A Flawed System
Using Weeks On Chart to gauge success is a very flawed system. This is because it uses the same unit - a Week - no matter which position a Single or Album is at in the Chart. So a No.1 Hit is given 1 Week in the same Chart that a No.75 Hit is also given 1 Week. Any system that gives the same value to the lowest & highest Hits in the Chart is pretty useless. For example, Rod Stewart is counted as the UK's biggest Singles Act of 1976, because he spent 48 Weeks on the Chart. But not one of those Weeks was at No.1. As a contrast ABBA had 3 No.1 Singles that Year, with 12 Weeks at No.1 between them. It was the longest run at No.1, in a calendar Year, since The Beatles in 1964. But because ABBA's 1976 Hits spent 47 Weeks on the Chart, Rod Stewart is said to be 'Chart Champion' that Year just because he spent 1 more Week than ABBA on the Singles Chart! A far more accurate gauge of success in the Charts is to use a Points System. For example an Inverse Top 75 System gives 75 Points to each No.1 Position, down to 1 Point for each No.75 Position. So you don't get the same nonsense as a Weeks On Chart method, where the No.1 scores exactly the same as the Hit at No.75 - 1 Week. If you use the Top 10 to work out the UK Singles Acts of 1976, then ABBA are 1st - 259 Points & Rod Stewart is only in 16th place - 68 Points. If you use the entire Chart for 1976 then ABBA are 1st - 3156 Points & Rod Stewart is 2nd - 2770 Points. Showing, in both cases, that using Weeks On Chart gives ridiculously distorted results, because it is a stupid way to gauge Chart success. 82.6.134.233 (talk) 02:02, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, and an album isn't equivalent to a single and a chart sale in 2015 isn't the same as a chart sale in 1975. Also the difference between a number one and a number two isn't the same as the difference between no. 74 and no. 75, so actually you'd have to use some kind of power curve to allocate points. Like I said above, we either keep this page and update it, or propose it for deletion. I don't attribute it with any kind of deep meaning. Btljs (talk) 06:21, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Combined weeks (definitions and clarity)
I wonder whether it would be appropriate to change the opening sentence describing the list, in order to clarify that it refers to the artists whose releases combined have spent x weeks in the two charts? And also to change the table headings accordingly? Here's my reasoning:

An artist's discography combined might spend a total of 150 weeks in the charts, even if the artist in question has only been releasing music for a year. However an artist is either in the chart(s) or out of the chart(s) on any given week – a binary choice – and it would sound wrong to say someone has spent 36 weeks in the charts in a 3-month period. Yes, the charts are calculated in weeks and I realise in lists like these a "week" doesn't exactly translate to a period of time because they don't take individual days into account, however this quirk of the way we talk about the charts can give way to multiple interpretations.

Really it's about one metric (amount of successful output) sounding like another (success over time) because of the units (weeks). It's a bit clearer that this list uses the former metric when you look at the stats for albums and singles charts together, however it's particularly easy to get caught out when considering either the singles chart or the album chart individually. Technically the units here should probably be "weeks combined" and the final column should be "total weeks combined".

So why does this matter? Purely for the sake of clarity. I'm not suggesting one metric is better than the other but, like "volume" vs "length", they have different uses. For example, you can't use these stats to work out how little of their career each artist has spent out of the charts. To avoid confusion we just need the right wording: 1) the phrase "releases combined" (or similar) could be used in the opening, 2) "weeks" could be changed to "weeks combined" in important places and 3) in places the article/list currently uses "combined" to refer to the album and singles charts together, it could simply be "total" or "total weeks combined" or similar, as appropriate.

Thanks for reading, thoughts welcome. :)TollyFolly (talk) 16:13, 17 August 2023 (UTC)