The UK’s Official Charts Company is changing their singles chart rules so Ed Sheeran can’t break them again

Early July will see significant changes made to the UK’s official singles chart, with the introduction of new rules to prevent one artist dominating the music charts at the expense of emerging talent.

Most notably, any one lead artist will only be able to have three songs in the singles chart at any one time. The top three by sales and sale-equivalent streams will be eligible, while the rest will be excluded.

The changes made by The Official Charts Company follows the record-breaking period at the beginning of this year where 16 Ed Sheeran songs dominated the UK top 20 chart following the release of Divide. The phenomenon led some commentators to ask whether the UK charts (and those in other markets where the Sheeran Effect was painting the charts Divide blue)were “broken”.

Official Charts want to prevent this from occurring again in the future, as well as to minimise double-counting of album tracks by major artists on the singles chart.

Adjustments to the Official Charts streaming ratio will also be made, with older tracks “past their peak and in steep and prolonged decline” counted using a different formula. The aim is to again support new artists with the potential to enter the charts and allow for more rapid turnover of chart hits.

These new regulations, made in consultation with independent and major labels, are predicted to boost the number of songs entering the chart by up to 10%.

Chart calculation methods are being revised more often in most markets as the industry adjusts to rapidly shifting consumer habits. Streaming has only overtaken digital downloadsas the dominant format in the past 18 or so months, and most official national charts have been counting streaming in the singles rankings for only a few years.

ARIA, meanwhile, has been on the cautious side when it comes to adopting streaming-era changes taken up by other charts organisations; they began taking streaming into account for the Australian album charts just over two months ago.

“ARIA constantly monitors the operation of its charts and its counterparts in other territories, to ensure that they continue to properly reflect the Australian market,” a spokesperson told TMN. “While there are no current plans to change the rules applicable to the ARIA Singles Chart, it is a topic under constant review.”

Official Charts’ decision seems to be a significant departure from their official position at the time of Sheeranmania’s streaming peak in March.

“÷ has generated 79,000 album streams,” OCC’s chief executive Martin Talbot told The Guardian at the time, noting that the next most-streamed album in the space of one week had been Stormzy’s debut with 21,000. “[Divide] is an absolute outlier. And you shouldn’t change rules for extreme cases.”

The next new album with a fighting chance to equal Sheeran’s chart-skewing feat would probably have been Taylor Swift’s newie, rumoured for later this year – and now it seems even she won’t get a chance.

This story has been updated to include comment from ARIA.