All killer, no filler: why Greatest Hits are back at the top of the album charts
Chart-dominating compilations started in 1958, when Columbia Records packaged up the first smashes by Johnny Mathis as Johnny’s Greatest Hits. The label had already paid to record the singles, so the collection offered a mouthwatering licence to reprint money.
It is a trick that continues today. Queen’s Greatest Hits, Legend by Bob Marley & the Wailers and Abba Gold have each clocked up more than 900 weeks on the UK album charts, and are back in the UK Top 40 alongside newer collections such as Diamonds by Elton John and Timeless by the Bee Gees.
For the chart week of 17 to 23 July, there were 13 greatest hits albums in the Top 40, as there were in the comparative week in 2019; in 2017, however, there were five; in 2014, four. So why are they back? Lockdown and “comfort listening” go some way to explaining the current spike, but not the upward trajectory over the past decade.
What we can term Mathis-mathematics is, counterintuitively, even truer in an age of streaming. If you play any classic track on a playlist on Spotify, streams can end up counting towards the artist’s official greatest hits. The chart rules changed in 2015 to accommodate the creation of “streaming-equivalent albums” where the most popular tracks on an album count towards its chart placing. “Essentially we’re trying to create a proxy for the album in the streaming environment,” explains Martin Talbot, chief executive of the Official Charts Company.
If a track appears on multiple albums, its chart-eligible streams are awarded to the album highest in the charts. “The data we get isn’t accurate enough for us to be able to identify whether someone has played Bohemian
Rhapsody from Queen’s Greatest Hits or from A Night at the Opera [where it first appeared],” admits Talbot. In his 2019 book Rockonomics, economist Alan Krueger outlines the “bandwagon effect”, which is “a tendency for what is popular to become even more popular”. Success begets more success and pre-eminence rises exponentially. Hence streaming creates a virtuous circle for greatest hits albums.
So should there be a separate chart for greatest hits to stop them clogging the arteries (chart-eries?) of the main Top 40? Talbot is wary of conjuring up a new chart overnight, even if greatest hits are on the march. “Laws made in haste are flawed laws in themselves,” he says.
Q4, the last three months of the year, is normally the record business’s biggest bonanza, with both major new releases and catalogue-reinvigorating greatest hits flooding the Top 40. However, as acts such as Adele kick their new albums into the long grass, there could be an imbalance in this commercial ecosystem. It doesn’t exist yet, but surely Winter Wonderland: The Christmas Hits of Johnny Mathis is only a catalogue marketing meeting away.