Who makes this, and why

My name is Rob Sicat. I make Rotation on my own. I have been a DJ and a collector for a long time. The one question I could never answer from a chart was the only one I cared about. Not what is big. What is moving.

Every chart you can read tells you what already won. A record sits at number three for five weeks and the list says the same thing every day. Meanwhile something climbs from 180th to 20th in one country and no list anywhere mentions it. Rank hides volume. That gap is the whole reason this exists.

So Rotation measures the move. It reads the charts that publish, every day, in 165 markets. Records rank by how fast they are climbing, never by how high they already sit. The arithmetic is published in full at methodology, including the parts that do not work. I would rather you argue with the formula than trust it.

The pressings are different. Those are chosen, by me or by somebody I am naming, and a chosen list has a person on the hook for it. The chart is a measurement. A pressing is taste. The site keeps them apart on purpose and says which is which on every page.

What it will not do

It does not hold licensed play counts and it never publishes a total. A chart of totals is a chart of how big things already are, which is the one thing this must not be.

It does not guess. Where a record has no year, no place or no evidence, the row prints a dash. Every figure on the site names the dates it used, and every sheet says what it is missing. A dash is better than a sentence covering for one.

Where the data comes from

Spotify, Shazam, Apple Music and YouTube, plus regional charts most lists skip. Places come from MusicBrainz, or from a signed call that says what it overrode. Nothing here is a number I made up.

Rob Sicat · rotation.today