This week’s ARIA Singles Chart will be a Styles vs Sheeran showdown

While Ed Sheeran comes ever closer to notching a fourteenth consecutive week on top of the ARIA Singles Chart, his countryman Harry Styles may end up raining on his parade.

Currently on par with Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise, which hit #1 in October 1995, Sheeran’s Shape Of You is poised to break the record if it can hold off competitors for one more week.

But Styles’ new single Sign Of The Times is firing on all cylinders. The track has shot to #1 on iTunes in Australia and is reportedly outselling the runner-up, Something Just Like This by The Chainsmokers & Coldplay, by at least four to one.

At the beginning of the weekend, however, Sign Of The Times hardly looked like a viable contender when Spotify released their streaming charts.

The track was way down at #34 on Spotify’s Australian chart with only 66,806 daily streams. Sheeran’s all-conquering Shape Of You nearly tripled that the same day with 188,977.

The supposed reason for Styles’ unexpectedly low streaming numbers? A Spotify malfunction that prevented thousands of people from listening to the song.

A server glitch on Friday meant that users of the popular streaming service were unable to search for the track upon release, costing Styles a fair chunk of his expected streams as well as a fair shot at a #1 debut solo single.

Spotify have come forward and taken responsibility for the fault, but questions are still being raised about how much of an impact the error will have on determining the outcome of the upcoming ARIA Charts, considering what’s at stake.

The ARIA singles Chart is compiled by collating both iTunes downloads and figures from streaming sites.

The latest Spotify charts, however, show a drastic improvement for Styles’streaming numbers. Sign Of The Times has since jumped to #11 in Australia with 116,466 streams daily streams – a much more credible number for an artist of Styles’ calibre.

Assuming Styles fails to hit #1 later this week and put an end to Sheeran’s party, the jury will be out on whether this debacle should be held accountable for the result, or whether it’s simply another case of streaming listeners generally taking longer to discover new music.

Streamers tend to listen to songs they know and love, steered by popular and “Top Tracks” playlists. This partly explains Sheeran’s prolonged stint at #1, combined with the fact that the song is a bona fide hit.

The significant growth in streaming numbers over the first few days for Styles is completely routine for most artists – take former bandmate turned fellow solo artist ZAYN. His latest single Still Got Time ft. PartyNextDoor debuted at #63 on the Australian Spotify charts with a mere 46,961 streams. From there, it has made incremental jumps up the chart, doubling its stream tally after one week in the chart.

This presents a glimmer of hope for Styles. The devoted fanbase who help to make him a contender for #1 in the first place are working hard to make up the deficit caused by the technical error.

While the coordinated campaign is chiefly focused on the UK’s Official Charts – where Styles is storming ahead in the midweek numbers, but hasn’t had his compromised streaming numbers factored in yet – similar efforts are no doubt underway among Styles’ Australian fans.

But perhaps the ARIA record is well and truly meant for Sheeran. It’s worth noting that currently, Sign Of The Times has amassed 11.71 million Spotify streams globally; two days after release, Shape Of You already had 12.71 million.

While it’s entirely possible that Shape Of You might be starting to wear thin for some fans, Harry Styles may just be another hopeful who doesn’t quite have the legs to compete with the charting heavyweight, ultimately granting Sheeran another noteworthy accolade.