It is Wednesday morning as I write this, late morning at the New York City offices of Billboard Music. Yet, several days late at this point, neither the album charts or song charts for the week have been published or posted. There are various ideas about why this is the case–it seems most likely at this point that the problem involves the proper sales for songs by the group NewJeans, which will determine whether it or the Barbie soundtrack is the #1 album of the week and which songs from both albums enter the Billboard Hot 100 as debuts. There could be other scenarios of course, but this seems the most likely, since whatever sales verification needed to be done for the top ten singles was already done when that list was released a bit late on Monday.

In general, the Billboard Hot 100 is already slower than all of the other major national charts that are released within the world. Just like Americans are habitually slow at counting votes, so slow that it leads to concerns about the legitimacy of the process, so to Americans are slow at counting sales, streams, and radio spins. How slow Americans are can be determined by the difference between the UK and American charts. Both the UK and USA have chart weeks that run from Thursday at midnight to the following Thursday at midnight. But the UK releases their charts on Friday mornings and the United States does not release their singles charts, even normally, until Tuesday morning after releasing the top ten and teaser songs on Monday. Anytime there is a Monday holiday in the United States–a not infrequent occurrence–this is delayed. Anytime there is a problem with filtering sales because of questions of the legitimacy of those sales, the release of charts is delayed. Instead of releasing charts in a timely manner, the end result is that sloth is the normal state under the best of circumstances, and this is only exacerbated when there are issues that have to be worked out.

All of this makes following the American charts sometimes a frustrating and embarrassing manner. At a time where we are only thirty-six hours or so from the end of the raw data for the following week being finalized, we still have not found out the results of last week’s data, which is nearly a week old at this point. There were no holidays to slow anything down. There was no good reason, except for a lack of abilities in being able to properly deal with sales data, that we should have the sort of delays that we do in what should be a close to automatic process of inputting in data from radio stations, streaming companies, and sales into a database and seeing the results of it, something that could take hours to calculate, but hardly days. Great Britain, a nation of 60 million people, is able to do this job in hours, and their formulas are more complicated than our own. The United States should not have that much difficulty with this process, and the fact that we do suggests that we are doing something wrong.

Knowing that something is wrong, though, is very far to knowing what to do about it or being able to do anything about it. It is unlikely that Billboard knows or cares about my own opinions as to the extent to which their habitual tardiness in handling and preparing chart data, and their readiness to delay what is already a too-slow process even further whenever they can, harm the legitimacy of their operations. Yet to the extent that anyone cares what I think, it appears that sales data is the real problem here, and something should be done to record the data in such a way that it is easier to filter the data out and to determine the legitimacy of sales. One would not think that credit card or bank data would be very hard to manage for sellers, so that only one-time unique sales of one single would ever count, and anything else would simply be giving money to merchants without further influencing the chart. The same sort of filtering for streams, so as to remove stream farming, should also be a pretty straightforward process, and it does not seem to cause any issues. As is the case with voting, people try to manipulate charts because results matter and chart positions are used to declare songs and artists (and even genres) as winners. So long as winning matters, we need to be vigilant to make sure that the opportunities to manipulate those results are as nonexistent as possible for those counting the votes and compiling the data.