All posts tagged: Chart

BTS break new ground for K-pop with Billboard chart performance

BTS break new ground for K-pop with Billboard chart performance

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This BTS have become the first K-pop act to top the US Billboard 200 albums chart for two consecutive weeks as their latest album Arirang held on to the No 1 spot in its second week. Arirang is the first studio album released since the K-pop group, composed of RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook, went on hiatus in 2022 so the members could complete South Korea’s mandatory military service. The album was released on 20 March, with a free outdoor concert held the next day at Seoul’s historic Gwanghwamun Square. The concert was live-streamed on Netflix, and was followed a week later by a documentary that tracked BTS’s return to the studio and preparations for the concert. According to Billboard, Arirang remained at No 1 on the main albums chart with 187,000 equivalent album units, though it dropped 71 per …

When product managers ship code: AI just broke the software org chart

When product managers ship code: AI just broke the software org chart

Published by skeptic

Last week, one of our product managers (PMs) built and shipped a feature. Not spec’d it. Not filed a ticket for it. Built it, tested it, and shipped it to production. In a day. A few days earlier, our designer noticed that the visual appearance of our IDE plugins had drifted from the design system. In the old world, that meant screenshots, a JIRA ticket, a conversation to explain the intent, and a sprint slot. Instead, he opened an agent, adjusted the layout himself, experimented, iterated, and tuned in real time, then pushed the fix. The person with the strongest design intuition fixed the design directly. No translation layer required. None of this is new in theory. Vibe coding opened the gates of software creation to millions. That was aspiration. When I shared the data on how our engineers doubled throughput, shifted from coding to validation, brought design upfront for rapid experimentation, it was still an engineering story. What changed is that the theory became practice. Here’s how it actually played out. The bottleneck moved …

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

Published by skeptic

Waymo is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 U.S. cities, the company shared in a post on X this week. The eye-popping figure is reflective of the Alphabet-owned company’s accelerated commercial expansion. But it’s Waymo’s rate of growth in ridership and markets that offers a more compelling story.  In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today. Over that same two-year timespan, Waymo has expanded within its initial markets of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — and beyond them to Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. Those seven cities in the Sun Belt were all added in just the past year. Waymo’s robotaxi fleet has also grown, although the company has guarded those numbers and rarely provides updates. Data provided in December 2025 to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows the company had 3,067 robotaxis equipped with its 5th generation self-driving system. The company still uses that …

Harry Styles scores second UK singles and album chart double of his career

Harry Styles scores second UK singles and album chart double of his career

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Harry Styles has once again asserted his dominance over the UK music scene, achieving a number one chart double for the second time following the release of his latest album, the Official Charts Company has confirmed. The 32-year-old’s new 12-track record, titled Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, shot straight to the top of the album chart upon its release on Friday. Concurrently, his latest single, American Girls, has claimed the coveted number one spot on the singles chart. This feat mirrors his success in 2022, when his album Harry’s House and single As It Was also secured a chart double. The Official Charts Company noted that Styles has delivered the biggest opening week for a male solo artist in nine years, a record previously held by Ed Sheeran with his album Divide in 2017. This new release, his first in nearly four …

‘Zootopia 2’ Passes ‘Minecraft’ to Top 2025 Domestic Chart

‘Zootopia 2’ Passes ‘Minecraft’ to Top 2025 Domestic Chart

Published by Daniella Wilson

Zootopia 2 continues to make history at the box office. On Tuesday, the Disney Animation Studios blockbuster passed up A Minecraft Movie ($423.9 million) to rank as the highest-grossing domestic release of 2025 with $424.2 million in ticket sales. The Oscar-nominated pic was already the top-grossing Hollywood title of the year at both the global and international box office, animated or otherwise. That’s not all. The latest milestone caps one of the most surprising, and remarkable, runs in the history of the genre. When the sequel opened over Christmas, no one could predicted it would become the top-grossing animated film of all time, not adjusted for inflation. Through Tuesday, the film’s global haul stood at roughly $1.85 billion. The sequel opened to a record-breaking $559.5 million globally over its five-day Christmas launch, the largest animated opening in history for the genre on its way to becoming both the fastest animated or PG film ever to reach $1 billion, a task it completed in 17 days. Now in its 13th week, the film has remained in the …

Irving Azoff Weighs in on Billboard-YouTube Chart Dispute

Irving Azoff Weighs in on Billboard-YouTube Chart Dispute

Published by Daniella Wilson

Music industry titan Irving Azoff is weighing in on YouTube and Billboard‘s ongoing dispute over chart metrics, commending the music trade for keeping with its current policies while encouraging the rest of the music business to stand up to the video service and demand it pay music creators more. Azoff’s letter comes several months after YouTube had announced in December that it would be yanking its data from the Billboard charts, arguing the publication doesn’t put enough weight on free streams in its calculations for sales units. YouTube Music head Lyor Cohen argued that the weighting toward paid streams “doesn’t reflect how fans engage with music today and ignores the massive engagement from fans who don’t have a subscription.” “YouTube pays music creators — artists and songwriters — less than any other comparable digital service and should not have influence over the Billboard charts,” Azoff wrote in the letter shared on Friday. “When YouTube starts paying artists and songwriters on par with other music services, then its streams can be counted the same as Apple, …

UK Gambling Commission wagering requirements chart a course for 2026

UK Gambling Commission wagering requirements chart a course for 2026

Published by skeptic

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has introduced new changes that will affect online casinos, sportsbooks, bingo operators, and land-based casinos nationwide across 2026. The initial raft of changes took effect in January 2026 and applies to licensed gambling operators in Great Britain, but will have a wider impact on customers and account holders, marketing partners, and those responsible for compliance and risk. What do these wagering requirement changes mean? The UKGC outlined these changes in 2025, a formative period for games of chance in Britain, with the November 2025 Chancellor’s Budget widely expected to be detrimental to gambling operators. As we reported, the budget was not nearly as crippling to gambling firms and the wider commercial sector, but a consultation, published in error and then hastily reinstated, earmarked a possible 30% increase in gambling license fees from the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Labour attacked our pubs, tourism, and hospitality with National Insurance and Business Rates hikes and now they're hitting gambling with higher license fees. I know Labour MPs are a …

Robbie Williams Beats The Beatles’ Chart Record As Britpop Reaches Number One

Robbie Williams Beats The Beatles’ Chart Record As Britpop Reaches Number One

Published by Sam Flores

It’s official – Robbie Williams now has more UK number one albums to his name than any artist in history. On Friday evening, the Official Charts Company announced that Robbie had beaten the record previously held by The Beatles with the release of his 13th studio album Britpop. Britpop has become the Angels singer’s 16th number one, thanks to a combination of his studio albums, greatest hits collections and soundtrack releases. Last year, he matched The Beatles’ record of 15 UK number one albums after the companion album to the musical biopic Better Man reached the top spot. Robbie previously described Britpop as the album that he “wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995”. Robbie Williams’ Britpop has become his 16th number one in the UK He recalled: “It was the peak of Britpop and a golden age for British Music. I’ve worked with some of my heroes on this album; it’s raw, there are more guitars and it’s an album that’s even more upbeat and anthemic than usual. “There’s …

One Chart Says Time To Reload On This Commodity

One Chart Says Time To Reload On This Commodity

Published by Jenni Sidey

The precious metals landscape in recent times has been nothing short of record-breaking. New highs in gold and silver, but some of that momentum has been blown off on Thursday after a softer tone from President Trump on Iran eased safe-haven demand. Platinum, palladium, and other metals, such as copper, also cooled today, but one strategic commodity has yet to move higher in the metals bull run. That one strategic commodity that has yet to break out from multi-year lows is ammunition. It’s a consumable input to military power, law enforcement capability, and civilian deterrence, and remains deeply depressed relative to the broader hard-asset complex. The ammunition industry remains stuck in a multi-year glut because of overproduction runs from the Covid period, when firearm and ammo demand went through the roof because the Democratic Party’s dark-money NGOs unleashed protest and riots nationwide, and in some cases, burned entire city blocks down. Los Angeles Riots 2025, Marxists Burn Waymos Now, with renewed left-wing chaos emerging in Minneapolis and a clearer understanding of how violence is used …

China’s viral app ‘Are You Dead’ tops download chart and goes global, as critics call for name change

China’s viral app ‘Are You Dead’ tops download chart and goes global, as critics call for name change

Published by Sam Flores

A mobile application, bluntly named Are You Dead, has gone viral in China, topping Apple’s App Store charts for paid apps there over the past weekend. Priced at 8 yuan (about S$1.50), the app – which reads as Sileme in hanyu pinyin – is aimed at China’s rapidly expanding population of older residents and young singles who live alone. It prompts users to check in once a day by pressing a large green button.  If they fail to do so for more than two consecutive days, the app automatically notifies by email an emergency contact nominated by the user. China’s English-language newspaper Global Times reported that the app downloads spiked in recent days and it has gone viral on Chinese social media, with many short videos discussing it. The heated debate was over its controversial and morbid name rather than its function. This stemmed from the common belief among the Chinese that using a product with such a grim and unpleasant name would bring ill luck and lead to the user’s death.  Suggestions have emerged …