{"id":9409,"slug":"itunes-chart-stale-feed-test-2026","title":"Is a near-frozen iTunes chart a stale feed or a real market? Distinct daily chart orderings and memberships per African market, 16 August to 6 November 2026","source":"This desk's own daily collection of Apple's iTunes Store Top Songs RSS feed (afw_chart_snapshot \/ afw_chart_entry)","source_url":"https:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/gw\/rss\/topsongs\/limit=100\/json","source_type":"computed","method":"For every iTunes Store Top Songs snapshot this desk holds for each market up to 6 November 2026, two fingerprints are computed: an ordering fingerprint, the MD5 of the snapshot's positions and titles concatenated in position order, and a membership fingerprint, the MD5 of its titles concatenated in alphabetical order with position discarded. distinct_orderings and distinct_memberships count how many unique values of each fingerprint that market produced across all its snapshots. The test exists to separate two explanations of a very high day-over-day carryover figure: a collector repeatedly storing a cached or stale payload, which would produce few distinct ORDERINGS, versus a genuinely thin storefront in which the same small set of titles keeps clearing Apple's reporting threshold while re-ranking, which produces many distinct orderings but few distinct memberships. A market returning one distinct ordering and one distinct membership per snapshot indicates the collector is working normally for that market on that feed.","unit":"count","license":"Afrobeats Wire's compilation and analysis are licensed CC BY 4.0. Rights in the underlying source data remain with the source named above.","confidence":"high","retrieved":"2026-11-07 13:55:38","n":17,"first_party":0,"columns":[{"key":"market","label":"Market","type":"text"},{"key":"iso2","label":"ISO","type":"text"},{"key":"snapshots","label":"Snapshots","type":"number"},{"key":"distinct_orderings","label":"Distinct chart orderings","type":"number"},{"key":"distinct_memberships","label":"Distinct chart memberships","type":"number"},{"key":"distinct_memberships_pct","label":"Distinct memberships as % of snapshots","type":"number"},{"key":"itunes_carryover_pct","label":"iTunes day-over-day carryover, %","type":"number"}],"rows":[{"market":"Guinea-Bissau","iso2":"GW","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":8,"distinct_memberships":5,"distinct_memberships_pct":6.25,"itunes_carryover_pct":99.89},{"market":"Gambia","iso2":"GM","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":42,"distinct_memberships":23,"distinct_memberships_pct":28.75,"itunes_carryover_pct":98.57},{"market":"Niger","iso2":"NE","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":45,"distinct_memberships":28,"distinct_memberships_pct":35,"itunes_carryover_pct":99.42},{"market":"Cabo Verde","iso2":"CV","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":61,"distinct_memberships":37,"distinct_memberships_pct":46.25,"itunes_carryover_pct":98.68},{"market":"Eswatini","iso2":"SZ","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":77,"distinct_memberships":66,"distinct_memberships_pct":82.5,"itunes_carryover_pct":96.47},{"market":"Burkina Faso","iso2":"BF","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":78,"distinct_memberships_pct":97.5,"itunes_carryover_pct":92.14},{"market":"Botswana","iso2":"BW","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":79,"distinct_memberships":79,"distinct_memberships_pct":98.75,"itunes_carryover_pct":84.83},{"market":"Egypt","iso2":"EG","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":14.01},{"market":"Ghana","iso2":"GH","snapshots":79,"distinct_orderings":79,"distinct_memberships":79,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":73.57},{"market":"Kenya","iso2":"KE","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":65.71},{"market":"Mauritius","iso2":"MU","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":86.51},{"market":"Mozambique","iso2":"MZ","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":90.4},{"market":"Namibia","iso2":"NA","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":72.91},{"market":"Nigeria","iso2":"NG","snapshots":79,"distinct_orderings":79,"distinct_memberships":79,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":13.88},{"market":"Uganda","iso2":"UG","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":90.41},{"market":"South Africa","iso2":"ZA","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":26.58},{"market":"Zimbabwe","iso2":"ZW","snapshots":80,"distinct_orderings":80,"distinct_memberships":80,"distinct_memberships_pct":100,"itunes_carryover_pct":86.04}]}