Are music charts meaningless today?

Drake and Kanye West — two reigning kings of pop music — both flooded the American consciousness with music this summer in strikingly different manners.

West released a series of seven-track albums, including one bearing his name and one collaboration with Kid Cudi. Drake, meanwhile, dumped the contents of his hard drive on streaming services as a 25-track behemoth titled “Scorpion.”

Both approaches might seem ostentatious, but they also hinted that pop artists might be using some savvy trickery to manipulate the charts.

If that’s the case, it worked.

Despite lackluster reviews, Kanye’s “ye” charted at the top of the Billboard 200 albums chart. He also set a record: Every single song debuted in the Top 40 of the Billboard 100. Perhaps that’s because it was only seven tracks, which encouraged listeners to spin (stream) it again and again. Perhaps that was Kanye’s plan.

And, despite its own lackluster reviews, Drake’s “Scorpion” utterly decimated current streaming records. It broke the oneweek U.S. streaming record for an album in a mere three days, eclipsing Post Malone’s “beerbongs & bentleys,” which earned the record less than two months prior. Perhaps that was inevitable, given the sheer amount of songs listeners had to work through. Perhaps that was Drake’s plan.

These records aren’t surprising. Instead, they’re a function of the charts desperately trying to figure out how to rank music in the streaming age.

Billboard added streaming songs as one of the metrics for its charts in 2012, leading the Recording Industry Association of America and Nielsen to follow suit. The criteria have changed several times in the interim — just last month, the company made changes to weight paid streams on services like Spotify over unpaid ones on jukebox-esque services like Pandora for the Billboard 100 singles chart. Meanwhile, for the Billboard 200, 1,500 streams of any songs on one record equals one listen to that record.

As the charts struggled to come up with a streaming equivalent to an album purchase or a song download, the media have been awash with headlines touting the latest recordbreaking chart numbers. Artists such as Adele, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Drake, Kanye, Lil Wayne and Post Malone are constantly breaking each others’ records, leaving bands such as Prince, the Rolling Stones and ABBA in digital obscurity.

All these headlines spark a few questions: If records are being broken every time the chart-bearers change the rules, then do they mean anything? Is it fair to compare Beyoncé and the Beatles? It was harder to purchase “The White Album” than to put a stream of “Lemonade” on repeat, after all. And if not, what happens to the way we conceive of the history of popular music? Meanwhile, are those shifting metrics altering the actual music we, the consumers, are receiving?

Billboard has tried to stay in front of the game, constantly reconsidering how to react to new technologies. The company is always considering what a song download is worth, what the difference is between a stream and a radio play, etc.